Senior al-Qaeda leader killed in drone strike in Syria.

 

File photo of a drone. Fox News/Getty.

A senior al-Qaeda leader was killed in a drone strike in Syria. Fox News. Salim Abu-Ahmad was killed in a drone strike near Idlib in rebel controlled Syria. He was a planner, organizer and funder of regional terror attacks. The drone strike only killed Abu-Ahmad and was confirmed by the White Helmets group. Al-Qaeda has remained active in Syria throughout the civil war there. 

My Comment:

This will be a short post as there isn't too much to discuss but I did think it was worth noting that yet another senior al-Qaeda leader is dead. I think that it is great that the only time we really hear from al-Qaeda is when one of their people dies. And the next video that Ayman al-Zawahri will release will have even more names of al-Qaeda "martyrs". 

Al-Qaeda leaders getting destroyed isn't that uncommon but I was somewhat surprised that the United States was able to kill one without killing any civilians. Their record on that has not been very good lately, with the infamous case in Afghanistan where an innocent aid worker and his family was misidentified as an ISIS terrorist and blown up by a missile. That's not the way to do it but this case shows how it is done. 

The Syrian Civil War has almost completely fallen out of the news cycle with almost no coverage of the continuing fighting. Indeed, I am betting many Americans don't even know we have troops there or that Bashar al-Assad has been threatening them. I personally was honestly surprised there was still surviving al-Qaeda fighters in Syria, though they might be affiliated with whatever al-Nusra is calling themselves now. 

As much as the media has hyped the threat of Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven, I wonder if Syria is a possibility. There are less places to hide in Syria and a huge number of factions that are hostile to international terror groups but they are also hostile to each other. Perhaps a terror group could take advantage of that? Plus Syria has the added benefit of being much closer to Europe and having established smuggling and human trafficking routs. It's something to think about...