US-led air strikes in Syria hit al Qaeda-linked militants and an Islamist rebel brigade in a rare expansion of weeks-long raids targeting the Islamic State group, a monitor said Thursday. American media reported that 24-year-old French bomb-maker David Drugeon, a Muslim convert who joined an al Qaeda offshoot, the Khorasan group, was killed in the overnight strikes.
The raids hit al Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front for only the second time since the US-led coalition began bombings in the war-torn country on September 23, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Strikes near the Turkish border also targeted the Ahrar al-Sham rebel group for the first time, the British-based monitoring group said. The Ahrar al-Sham rebel brigade is believed to have between 10,000 and 20,000 fighters and espouses a conservative ideology, though it has not expressed the same transnational jihadist aspirations as Al-Nusra or IS.
But many of its top leaders have ties to al Qaeda and the group has fought alongside Al-Nusra against other moderate rebel groupings in parts of northern Syria. Fox News and other American media reported that a US strike hit a vehicle in Syria's Idlib province, believed to be carrying Drugeon. The car's driver lost a leg and was not expected to live, while a passenger believed to be Drugeon was killed, Fox said, citing "well-placed military sources".
US officials confirmed they had carried out strikes Wednesday but said they could not confirm that Drugeon had been killed. "We are still assessing the outcome of the attack," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told AFP. He said "initial indications" suggest the strikes destroyed or severely damaged "several Khorasan Group vehicles, terrorists and buildings assessed to be meeting and staging areas, IED-making facilities and training facilities".
The Syria conflict began as an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's regime in 2011 and has since escalated into a multi-sided civil war that has drawn thousands of jihadists from overseas. The fighting has continued despite the US-led raids, with at least 12 people killed in two regime barrel bomb raids in the northern city of Aleppo on Thursday, the Observatory said.