Russian air force strikes Daesh leaders in Syria

Moscow: Russia’s defense ministry says it has killed several Daesh leaders outside their stronghold of Raqqa in Syria.

The ministry said Wednesday that it received a tip-off from the Syrian opposition last week about an upcoming meeting of Daesh leaders outside Raqqa, and kept the area under surveillance for two days before an Su-34 bomber attacked the meeting place. The date of the strike was not disclosed.

Russia is a staunch ally of President Bashar Al Assad, and it has been accused of using its air force operation in Syria which began in September in order to prop up Al Assad.

The defense ministry said it is cooperating with unidentified “representatives of patriotic opposition forces” ave been providing Moscow with potential targets in Syria.

Meanwhile it was revealed that one of the 10 Daesh leaders killed by US-led air strikes this past month, Sharaf Al Mouadan, was close to Paris attacker Sami Amimour and paved the way for him to leave France for Syria, the mayor of the French city where both grew up said.

An air strike in Syria on Dec. 24 killed Al Mouadan, US Army Colonel Steve Warren said late Tuesday, adding that he was directly associated with Abdul Hamid Abaaoud, suspected ringleader of the Nov. 13 Paris shootings and bombings that killed 130 people.

Jean-Christophe Lagarde, the mayor of Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris, said Al Mouadan was also connected to Amimour, a 28-year-old former bus driver who blew himself up in Paris’s Bataclan concert hall.

“They were arrested in 2012 when they planned to leave for Yemen and were placed under judicial supervision,” Lagarde told Reuters in a telephone interview, adding that a third man was part of their group.

“He (Al Mouadan) was the first to leave for Syria, in June or July 2013. The other two left about two months later. He paved the way. What I don’t understand is that (Al Mouadan) missed police check-ins for two months and no one reacted, no one went after the other two.” Lagarde said he did not personally know Al Mouadan but that he knew Amimour’s family.

“What Amimour’s family told me is that he (Al Mouadan) seemed to be the leader of their group of three people,” he said, and the family had said Al Mouadan rose in Daesh ranks more than the other two.

While some French media have said they were childhood friends, Lagarde said he had heard that Al Mouadan and Amimour did not meet before becoming radicalised in 2011.

Al Mouadan lived in a middle-class, residential district, midway between Drancy city centre and the train station, Lagarde said, insisting that this was not an underprivileged area. His family was originally from Morocco, Lagarde added.

The mayor’s remarks helped to flesh out a picture of who was killed in the US-led strikes and their links to the Paris attacks. Another of those killed in the air strikes was Abdul Kader Hakim, who facilitated Daesh’s external operations and had links to the Paris attack network, Warren said. Hakim was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Dec. 26.

Amimour himself missed at least four weekly check-ins with French police who were investigating him on suspicion of terrorism-related activity.

After nearly a month, French authorities put out the warrant for his arrest but he was already in Syria.

At least eight of the Paris attackers are dead, with seven killed on Nov. 13 and one, the alleged ringleader Abaaoud, a few days later in a police raid in Brussels. The number involved in the attacks may have been 10 or higher and at least four people continue to be sought.