Khorasan, also known as the Khorasan Group, refers to a group of senior al-Qaeda members who operate in Syria. The group is reported to consist of a small number of fighters who are all on terrorist watchlists, and coordinate with the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria. They are of Salafi ideology. Salafi jihadism or Jihadist-Salafism is a neologism used to describe a jihadist movement or ideology in the Salafi movement. The terms "Salafist jihadists" and "Jihadist-Salafism" were coined by scholar Gilles Kepel in 2002 to describe the beliefs of the Salafi who became interested in violent/offensive jihad starting in the mid-1990s. The concept is now more often referred to simply as jihadism or as the "jihadist movement".
While Salafism had next to no presence in Europe in the 1980s, by the mid-2000s, Salafist jihadists had acquired "a burgeoning presence in Europe, having attempted more than 30 terrorist attacks among E.U. countries since 2001."
Practitioners are referred to as "Salafi jihadis" or "Salafi jihadists". They are sometimes described as a variety of Salafi, and sometimes as separate from "good Salafis" whose movement is a "precursor" of Salafi jihadism.
At an intelligence gathering in Washington, D.C. on 18 September 2014 ,Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that "in terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as ISIS."[
The term first appeared in news media in September 2014, although the United States had reportedly been keeping track of the group for two years previously.
On 23 September 2014, United States Central Command stated that they had conducted eight air strikes against the group’s training camps,command and control facilities, and other sites in the area west of Aleppo, Syria. The attacks were ineffective and killed only one or two militants, largely because the members of the group had been warned in advance.
On 6 November 2014, US-led coalition forces bombed targets in the Idlib and Aleppo provinces. Despite US military officials stating that only the Khorasan Group was targeted, local activists and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that both Ahrar ash-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra were also hit. It was later announced that the Khorasan's chief bombmaker David Drugeon was believed to have been killed in the attack but later reports indicated he was only wounded.[3]
A third raid on the group was carried out on 13 November 2014.
On 18 November, the Syrian Army ambushed a group of Khorasan militants in the countryside of Latakia in a separate operation. Eleven members of the group were killed and another 13 were wounded or captured. The Kazakh and Chechen field commanders of the unit, along with Burmese and Saudi jihadists, were among the dead. The attack also left 7 al-Nusra Front fighters dead.
On 19 November, the US launched another airstrike on Khorasan near Hazm, which struck and destroyed a storage facility associated with the group.
On 1 December, the US carried out another airstrike on Khorasan near Aleppo. On 10 December, the CIA revealed that both Muhsin al-Fadhli and David Drugeon, who were both thought dead after US airstrikes, were still alive. However, Drugeon was revealed to be badly wounded, and was recuperating inside of a Khorasan-operated hospital.
No comments:
Post a Comment