US-designated 'militant' killed in Syria strike

A US-designated member of Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al-Nusra Front has been killed in an airstrike in the north of the country, a monitor said Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Sanafi al-Nasr, a Saudi national, had been killed in an airstrike in Aleppo province along with two other senior Al-Nusra members.

The monitor said the three were killed in an airstrike that hit their car in the west of Syria's northern Aleppo province on Thursday.

But the Britain-based group said it was unclear whether the strike was carried out by the US-led coalition targeting Daesh or Russian warplanes that have also been carrying out strikes in Aleppo in recent days.

Al-Nasr was listed as an alias for Abdul Mohsen Abdullah Ibrahim al-Sharikh, a Saudi national listed as a "specially designated global terrorist" by the US Treasury Department in 2014.

The designation accused him of having served as a "senior ANF (Al-Nusra) and al-Qaeda faciliator based in Syria."

The Observatory said two other senior Nusra figures going by the names of Abu Yasser al-Maghrebi and Abu Mohammed al-Jazrawi were also killed in the strike.

Al-Nusra's official Twitter account for Aleppo posted a photo of a mangled car it said had been targeted in an airstrike in Al-Dana in western Aleppo.

"The planes of the Crusader-Arab coalition targeted one of the cars of the fighters in Al-Dana city in west Aleppo," the account said.

But it gave no toll in the strike and no names of those in the car.

Al-Nasr has been erroneously reported dead in the past.

US officials had no immediate comment on the reported deaths.

US strikes in Syria have largely targeted Al-Nusra's rival jihadists in Daesh group.

But Washington has occasionally targeted members of what it calls the Khorasan group, which it says is a cell of Al-Qaeda veterans charged with planning attacks in the West.
Source: AFP