Having previously claimed that a May 3 airstrike in northwestern Syria killed a top Al-Qaeda** leader, the Pentagon is now expressing doubts.
“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” a senior US Department of Defense official told a Washington, DC, newspaper on Friday.
However, the same paper reported that other Pentagon officials were still maintaining they had killed a member of the terrorist group.
The strike was carried out on May 3 near the town of Qorqanya in northern Idlib Governorate, an area of Syria still occupied by Al-Qaeda-aligned militias and Turkish troops. US Central Command claimed it had killed “a senior Al Qaeda leader” using a Hellfire missile. However, the family of the victim soon identified him as Lotfi Hassan Misto, a 56-year-old shepherd and former bricklayer with no ties to Al-Qaeda.
“He had nothing to do with the revolution. ... He had nothing to do with the Al-Nusra Front or with the Islamic State” or any other terrorist group, Lotfi’s brother, Mohamed, told reporters. Al-Nusra was a former front group for Al-Qaeda that merged with other similar groups to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.
After Misto’s story spread, the Pentagon said on May 9 it was “in the process of confirming the identity of the individual killed in the strike.”
This is far from the first time the US has made such a mistake. During the final days of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, a US airstrike inside the city of Kabul purported to kill a Daesh-Khorasan suicide bomber en route to attack civilians massed outside the city’s main airport. However, CENTCOM admitted several weeks later that the strike had killed Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of a US-based aid group, and nine other members of his family, including seven children.
*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other states.
**Al-Qaeda and al-Nusra Front (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) are terrorist organizations banned in Russia and many other countries.