Konflikten i Syrien

U.S. Airdrop in Syria Ends Up Arming the Kurds

Last weekend, the White House announced that the U.S. had dropped 50 tons of ammunition to Syrian Arabs fighting the Islamic State. Some officials now say that the new Arab coalition was a front and that Kurdish groups received most of the weapons -- as the U.S. intended.

American and Kurdish officials and Syrian Arab opposition leaders told us this week that ammunition said to have been for the Syrian Arab Coalition, a newly announced group of Sunni Arab brigades in northeastern Syria, had largely ended up arming the Kurdish Democratic Union Party and its associated military forces, known as the People's Protection Units or YPG. That will aid the Kurds in fighting the Islamic State and cementing their control of Kurdish territory.
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Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria who just returned from a tour of the region, told us that the Sunni Arab groups in the coalition were either completely unknown or relatively obscure, and certainly not in a position to mount a major offensive against the Islamic State in big cities like Raqqa, where the Islamic State has tens of thousands of well-armed fighters.

"The Arab groups are either not significant or in the case of the Assyrian Christian group, more or less unknown,” Ford said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means they haven’t had an impact on the ground heretofore.”

Jihadists on social media are claiming that a senior al Qaeda strategist known as Sanafi al Nasr has been killed in an airstrike in Syria. Two other al Qaeda members, Abdul Malik al Jazrawi (a Saudi) and Abu Yasir al Maghrebi (a Moroccan), were also allegedly killed.
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Another Twitter user, known as Habib al Taymi, eulogized Nasr in several posts. One of the tweets says that Nasr has joined Muhsin al Fadhli “in paradise.” Fadhli is a Kuwaiti who served alongside Nasr in al Qaeda’s so-called “Khorasan Group.”
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Separately, Al Nusrah Front posted a picture purportedly showing a car struck by the “Crusader coalition” in Al Dana, a town in northern Syria west of Aleppo. Al Nusrah also published a picture of the corpses of the jihadists killed in the bombing, but has not identified them. The photos can be seen below.

If Nasr is dead, then al Qaeda has lost an important leader. Nasr, a Saudi whose real name is Abdul Mohsin Abdullah Ibrahim Al Sharikh, was long known for his active role in promulgating propaganda and messages online.

A US-designated "terrorist", a member of Al-Nusra, Saudi national Sanafi al-Nasr was killed in an air strike in Aleppo province along with two other senior Al-Nusra members, the Observatory said.
However, it was not clear if the strike was carried out by Russian or US-led warplanes, it said.