U.S. Strikes Al Qaeda In Syria, Pakistan
-- Counter Terrorism Blog
-- Counter Terrorism Blog
After a Sunday broad daylight strike inside Syria, questions remain about the special operations mission’s success. As we reported in today’s New york Daily News, the operation a few miles inside Syria’s border from neighboring Iraq resulted in the killing of Abu Ghadiyah, an Al Qaeda in Iraq senior facilitator from a well-known family of smugglers in Iraq’s Al Anbar province.
Wire service reports also suggest the American operators may have snatched two individuals after killing Ghadiyah and seven others in a farmhouse and adjacent tent near a Syrian village. But it’s still unclear who the prisoners are - or their significance to AQI, if any.
“Ghadiyah was one of the leading - if not the leading and most prominent - facilitators moving foreign fighters across the border” from Syria to Iraq, a U.S. intelligence official told me yesterday. “The removal of this individual would be a plus.”
Iraqi-born security scholar Nimrod Raphaeli told me that Syria’s internal security service, the Mukhabarat, is complicit in ensuring the border remains porous for AQI. “No one enters Iraq across the border without the Mukhabarat knowing about it,” Raphaeli says.
Syria’s protests over the U.S. incursion “just aren’t credible,” he adds.
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