Daesh* leader Abu al-Umarayn, who was involved in the abduction and subsequent beheading of a former US servicemen, has been killed in a precision drone strike in the Badiyah Desert in Syria, according to a coalition spokesman.
"Al-Umarayn had given indications of posing an imminent threat to coalition forces and he was involved in the killing of American citizen and former US army ranger, Peter Kassig. He has been linked to and directly involved with executing several other prisoners as a senior ISIS member," Colonel Sean Ryan pointed out.
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The colonel praised the ongoing coalition airstrikes, saying they disrupt Daesh's "command and control on the battlefield as we remove key figures from their ranks."
The US-led coalition's anti-Daesh activities in Syria are authorized neither by the Syrian government, nor by the UN Security Council.
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More than a year later, Daesh released a video showing a masked man standing over what looked like Kassig's severed head.
Confirming Kassig's slaying after a review of the video, then-US President Obama said that Kassig "was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity."
Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/Islamic State), a terrorist group banned in Russia and a number of other countries
