American drone kills leader of Wilayat al-Khair in Syria

Ahmed Adel

Continuous strikes are targeting ISIS’s senior leadership, paralyzing its operational capacity, as the US military announced the killing of one of the organization’s leaders, Abu Osama al-Muhajir, in an airstrike in eastern Syria.

The US Central Command (Centcom) announced in a statement posted on its Twitter account that it had killed one of the leaders of ISIS in eastern Syria, Abu Osama al-Muhajir, without specifying the location.

It stated that the killing of Muhajir was carried out by an MQ-9 drone.

An official at the US Department of Defense said that three American drones were flying over the area in search of Muhajir when they were harassed by Russian planes for about two hours, adding that shortly after that, the drones bombed Muhajir and killed him while he was riding a motorcycle in the Aleppo area.

Centcom believes that the killing of Muhajir will limit the ability of ISIS to plan and carry out terrorist attacks, noting that its operations against ISIS in cooperation with its partners in Syria and Iraq will continue in order to reach the goal of defeating the terrorist organization completely.

Who was he?

Abu Osama al-Muhajir, or Hammam Khader, also known as Abu Anas al-Shami and Hammam al-Shami, was the governor of what the terrorist organization called Wilayat al-Khair in the Deir Ezzor region in Syria, and he had been tasked with rebuilding the ISIS networks.

Muhajir hailed from the village of Bahra al-Khatuniyah near the town of Al-Hol in eastern Hasakah, Syria, and it is likely that he was the number two man in ISIS. The word “Muhajir” means that he is neither Syrian nor Iraqi.

Muhajir was working as a trainer for ISIS’s Cubs of the Caliphate camps during the organization’s control over large geographical areas in Syria. He was also considered one of the prominent leaders in the organization, and he came to the Al-Bab area in the Aleppo countryside after the organization’s defeat in eastern Syria.

Muhajir resided in Idlib for a period of nearly two years, then moved to the Baza’a region near the Syrian region of Al-Bab, and he was preparing to become the terrorist organization’s governor of the Levant.