Biden: Key Terrorist Has Been Taken 'Off the Field'

The Pentagon said Tuesday that it killed a leader of the Islamic State group in Syria in a drone strike. US Central Command said in a news release that Maher al-Agal was killed Tuesday and an unidentified senior official in the Islamic State group was seriously injured. The Pentagon said there were no civilian casualties, though it wasn't possible to immediately confirm that information, the AP reports. The US carried out the strike outside Jindaris, a town in northwest Syria close to the Turkish border.

The attack "takes a key terrorist off the field and significantly degrades the ability of [ISIS] to plan, resource, and conduct their operations in the region," President Biden said in a statement. The Washington Post reports al-Agal was regarded as among the top five ISIS leaders in Iraq and Syria. Tuesday's strike on him comes months after the head of the group, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, killed himself during a raid on his hideout by American special forces. The US said Al-Qurayshi blew himself up along with members of his family.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, al-Agal was a former prominent commander of the Islamic State group during its control of Raqqa and had since moved farther north to Afrin in 2020 under Turkish-backed factions. He was most recently a commander in a Turkish-backed faction called Jaysh Al-Sharqiyyah. While the Islamic State group's territorial state collapsed in 2019, its leaders have turned to guerilla tactics and have been able to "efficiently restructure themselves organizationally," according to the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan think tank. (More Islamic State stories.)