WarSclerotic

The United States-led coalition targeted a senior member of the Islamic State group involved in the 2014 killing of American aid worker Peter Kassig, a U.S. military spokesman said Monday.

Col. Sean Ryan, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS, said coalition forces conducted precision strikes that killed Abu al-Umarayn and “several other ISIS members.” He said the strikes, which took place on Sunday, occurred in a desert area in southeastern Syria.

The area is close to where Syria’s state news agency said the U.S.-led coalition fired several missiles at Syrian army positions in the country’s east, causing material damage. The SANA report said positions targeted on Sunday night are in the Ghorab Mountains, south of the eastern town of Sukhna.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group, said U.S. troops in the Tanf base near the Jordanian and Iraqi border fired 15 rockets at a Syrian military convoy that lost its way in the area. It gave no further details.

However, Mozahem al-Salloum, from the activist-run Hammurabi Justice News network that tracks developments in eastern Syria, denied reports that U.S. troops targeted Syrian army positions. The targets were only ISIS elements, al-Salloum added.

Attacks by the U.S.-led coalition against Syrian troops have been rare. In 2016, warplanes of the U.S.-led coalition bombed Syrian army positions in the eastern city of Deir el-Zour and killed dozens of soldiers.

Ryan, the military spokesman, said Abu al-Umarayn had given indications of “posing an imminent threat” to coalition forces and that he was involved in Kassig’s beheading. He also said Abu al-Umarayn was linked to and directly involved in the killings of several other prisoners of ISIS.

Kassig was captured Oct. 1, 2013, while delivering aid in Syria through a relief organization he founded. He converted to Islam during captivity and changed his first name to Abdul-Rahman.

His parents, Ed and Paula Kassig, had issued numerous appeals for his release after his life was threatened in an October 2014 ISIS video that showed the beheading of a fellow aid worker, Britain’s Alan Henning.

In mid-November 2014, ISIS released a video showing that Kassig, 26, was beheaded. The White House confirmed Kassig’s death two days later.

The U.S.-led coalition is supporting a group of Kurdish and Arab militias assaulting the last Islamic State territory in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border.

The Syrian army last month said it had completed its own operation against an ISIS pocket in southern Syria.

Meanwhile, a senior Hezbollah source said on Monday that neither the group nor Iranian positions in Syria had been struck last week during an alleged Israeli airstrike south of Damascus.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Israel carried out a missile attack in the area last Thursday evening. Israel has not said whether it conducted the attack and Syrian state media did not identify who carried it out.

Syrian state media said the country’s air defenses had thwarted an attack last Thursday by “hostile targets” in the Kiswah area, without identifying them.

“Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Kiswah, southern Syria, were not exposed to any bombardment,” the senior Hezbollah source told Reuters.

A Syrian army defector said at the time of the reported attack that the targets struck included two Syrian army brigades where Hezbollah is embedded.

According to two senior regional intelligence sources, the area where the incident is said to have occurred is where Hezbollah has its communications and logistics hub for southern Syria near the Israeli border.

A Syrian opposition figure familiar with the area said at the time of last week’s reported attack that Israel had targeted the area because Syrian army barracks there had become a recruitment hub for Iran-backed forces.