The US says its special forces have
killed a senior Islamic State (IS) member and captured his wife in a
rare ground raid in eastern Syria.
Abu Sayyaf helped direct oil, gas and financial operations for IS, as well as holding a military role, said a US Department of Defense statement.
It said forces tried to capture him, but he was killed after engaging them.
It is the first time the US is known to have carried out a ground operation to attack IS within Syria.
The operation was authorised by President Barack Obama and was carried out by forces based in Iraq.
US
officials said Abu Sayyaf was Tunisian, with one official telling CNN
he was the chief financial officer "of all of [IS]" and that the US had
seized "reams of data on how ISIS operates, communicates and earns its
money".
On Arabic social media, however, Abu Sayyaf was not being spoken of as a known public figure.
Oil and gas have been an important source of revenue for IS, which gained swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq last year.
On Saturday, the group took control of the northern part of the
ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, which it has been advancing on for three
days, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights - a UK-based
network that uses activists within Syria.
In other developments
More civilians were killed in Syrian government air raids in Idlib province, the Observatory reported
Turkey said it had shot down a Syrian
helicopter after it crossed into Turkish airspace, though Syrian state
media indicated that the aircraft was a drone.
The US said the operation in Syria was conducted "with the full
consent of Iraqi authorities", though it did not inform the Syrian
government in advance.
"We have warned [President Bashar
al-Assad's] regime not to interfere with our ongoing efforts against
[IS] inside of Syria," said National Security Council spokeswoman
Bernadette Meehan, adding that "the Assad regime is not and cannot be a
partner in the fight" against IS.
Analysis: Rajini Vaidyanathan, BBC News, Washington
This
was a rare, publicly announced operation for US special forces. In
Iraq, the US is working with the government, but in Syria, where it
isn't, these kind of operations are riskier.
For months now, coalition forces have been targeting IS militants
from the air - but the decision to send forces on the ground had already
been outlined by President Obama in a resolution to Congress. In
February he said they would be used "if we had actionable intelligence
about a gathering of [IS] leaders, and our partners didn't have the
capacity to get them".
The US has been criticised for not doing
enough to contain IS, and the scalp of Abu Sayyaf is being hailed as a
key victory. But taking out targets this way will lead to accusations of
mission creep - even if President Obama stressed to Congress that using
special forces didn't amount to another ground war, and that in the
fight against IS flexibility was key. The
Pentagon said Abu Sayyaf's wife, Umm Sayyaf, is suspected of being an
IS member and of being complicit in the enslavement of a young Yazidi
woman who was rescued in the raid.
It said it believed at least 12
militants had been killed at the scene, that there was hand-to-hand
fighting and that militants had tried to use women and children as
shields.
Umm Sayyaf has been taken into military detention in Iraq.
One
source with contacts in Deir al-Zour told the BBC that the operation
lasted for about 30 minutes around dawn in the residential quarters of
the al-Omar oil field, which houses about 500 families of IS fighters.
The bodies of 13 IS militants, as well as many more who were injured, were later brought to the town of al-Mayadeen, he said.
Syrian state media reported earlier on Saturday that government
forces had killed at least 40 IS fighters, including a man they
described as IS's "oil minister", in an attack in Deir al-Zour province
on the country's largest oil field.
The Syrian Observatory said the report was incorrectly taking credit for the US raid.
In
Iraq on Saturday, IS militants tightened their grip over the centre of
the city of Ramadi but reportedly withdrew from a key government
compound they had seized a day earlier.
Neither IS nor its
supporters on social media were commenting publicly on the raid against
Abu Sayyaf, with Twitter posts focussing instead on Ramadi.
The
US has been carrying out air strikes against IS in Iraq and Syria since
August last year. Shortly after they began, the Pentagon said there had
been a failed raid in Syria to free American hostages - the only other
ground operation inside the country it has acknowledged.
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