Coalition targets Daesh men from stranded convoy

Members of the Daeshgroup and their families are seen in a bus in Qara area in Syria's Qalamoun region on August 28, 2017 as they are transported to Deir Ezzor under part of an unprecedented deal to end three years of jihadist presence. (AFP / LOUAI BESHARA)

WASHINGTON/MOSCOW: The US-led coalition has killed dozens of terrorists linked to a convoy of Daesh buses stranded in the middle of the Syrian desert, a US military official said Thursday.
The convoy, which initially consisted of 17 vehicles, has been stalled in the Deir Ezzor region since Aug. 29.
US officials said about 300 Daesh militants were initially aboard, along with a similar number of civilians, likely family members.
The fighters had been headed from Lebanon to the Iraq border under an evacuation deal negotiated between Daesh and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, which has intervened in the war in neighboring Syria to prop up the Damascus regime.
The US was not party to the deal, and had blocked the convoy just short of the border by bombing the road and a bridge leading from the Syrian town of Hmaymah to the Daesh-held town of Albukamal further east.
Col. Ryan Dillon, a US military spokesman, said the coalition had not targeted the convoy itself and was permitting food and supplies to reach the stranded vehicles, but he noted about 85 Daesh fighters, either from the convoy or heading by vehicle to link up with it, had been picked off.
“We have struck individual ISIS (Daesh) fighters, and fighters that leave in small groups to walk away,” Dillon told Pentagon reporters in a phone briefing from Baghdad.
“As soon as they get far enough away from the buses, we have and will continue to strike ISIS fighters... where we can hit them without causing harm to the civilians that are part of that convoy.”
The 17-vehicle convoy split in two last week, with six buses heading west toward the Palmyra region, which is under Syrian regime control.
“Those buses drove further into western Syria, we just made the decision to stop monitoring it as they drew further into the interior,” Dillon said.
The coalition has offered to try to bring the situation to a head by contacting Russia and offering a proposal that would allow the civilians to escape.
Dillon said that proposal had not gained any traction, leaving open the question of the fate of the Daesh fighters and the civilians.
“We don’t see it as our issue,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russia claimed Friday to have killed several top commanders of Daesh in an airstrike in Syria, including the US-trained “minister of war” who has a $3 million bounty on his head.
“As a result of a precision airstrike of the Russian air forces in the vicinity of Deir Ezzor city, a command post, communication center and some 40 ISIS fighters have been killed,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement posted on Facebook.
“According to confirmed data, among the killed fighters are four influential field commanders including Deir Ezzor emir Abu Mohammed Al-Shimali,” the ministry said.
Gulmurod Khalimov, who is known as Daesh’s minister of war and the highest-ranking defector from ex-Soviet Tajikistan, suffered a “fatal injury,” it added.
Reports of Khalimov’s death have surfaced before, and the Tajik Interior Ministry said it could not immediately confirm the claim. “We are working with our Russian colleagues to obtain reliable information,” a spokesman told AFP.
But a spokesman for the Tajik security services, speaking to AFP, suggested that “this time around” he might have been killed. “We’re checking the information,” he said.
In 2016, the US offered a $3 million bounty for information leading to Khalimov’s location or arrest.
Russia’s SU warplanes dropped “bunker buster” bombs on the fighters as they were meeting near Deir Ezzor to discuss how to respond to the advance of the Syrian Army, Moscow said.
The Times reported in April that Khalimov, described as the highest-ranking Daesh commander in Mosul, had been killed in an airstrike. The trained sniper and former colonel, he was apparently wounded in 2015 but survived.
He headed the Tajik Interior Ministry’s special forces unit and received American training before joining Daesh in 2015, pledging allegiance to the terror group in a video released in May 2015.
In the footage, he warned that he and other Daesh recruits based in the Middle East were “coming” for top officials in the mainly Muslim Tajikistan, including long-ruling President Emomali Rakhmon.
The high-profile defection rocked the country.
Last year, his second wife, herself a former Interior Ministry official, fled Tajikistan with her three young children to join Khalimov in Syria.
His eldest son, 18-year-old Bekhruz, also tried to join his father in Syria but was detained at the Dushanbe airport, and sentenced this summer to 10 years in prison.
In July, police in Tajikistan killed four of Khalimov’s relatives in a gun battle, an Interior Ministry source has said, and three other relatives were detained.
The source claimed that all of those killed or detained were Daesh “supporters” and said they were intending to flee to neighboring Afghanistan, but did not offer any proof to back up the claims.