WASHINGTON // An ISIL leader with “direct” ties to the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks was among 10 senior figures in the group killed in Syria and Iraq this month, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
Baghdad-based US military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said that French national Charaffe Al Mouadan was killed in a US-led coalition air strike on December 24.
Mouadan had been actively plotting further attacks against the West, Col Warren said, without giving additional details.
“He was a Syrian-based ISIL member with a direct link to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Paris attacks cell leader,” Col Warren said.
Mouadan, 26, was the son of Morocco-born parents and the last of eight children.
He grew up in the suburbs of Paris, and was arrested in October 2012 while getting ready to leave with two neighbourhood friends for either Yemen or Afghanistan, via Somalia.
The United States has since August 2014 led an international coalition attacking the ISIL group in Iraq and Syria.
Col Warren declined to say if France had been involved in the strike against Mouadan.
Among the other leaders killed in December was a Syria-based Bangladeshi man who was educated in Britain and was allegedly an ISIL hacker.
“Now that he’s dead, ISIL has lost a key link between their networks,” Col Warren said.
Col Warren described another man as a forgery specialist with “links to the Paris attack network”.
* Agence France-Presse
