American
who joined Syrian rebels becomes first known US suicide bomber
Social media posts by an Al-Qaeda affiliate claim a man named Abu Hurayra Al-Amriki (Abu Hurayra the American) blew himself up in an attack in Syria. US officials say he is the first-known American suicide bomber in the civil-war besieged country.
30
May, 2014
On
Sunday, four men from the Al-Nusra Front, a jihadist organization
aligned with Al-Qaeda, carried out suicide bombings on army positions
in Idlib province, AFP reported. Dozens were killed or wounded,
though exact numbers of casualties are still unknown.
Abu
Sulayman al Muhajir, one of the top sharia officials in the Al-Nusra
Front, according to The Long War Journal, tweeted about the
involvement of an American man in the coordinated suicide attacks on
Tuesday.
A
Sunday tweet from Al-Nusra’s Twitter feed appears to show the same
man - a light-skinned Caucasian - sitting with three other men and
wearing a bomb vest.
According
to Google Translate, the original
Al-Nusra tweet translates to "# _ Front
victory in cooperation with the # Hawks _ Sham performs four
martyrdom operations in Mount _ # # forty Idlib."
US
law enforcement and counterterrorism officials confirmed the suicide
bombing to NBC News and said they have identified the American, but
would not release his identity or hometown.
Syrian
rebel sources based in London told NBC News that other jihadi tweets
suggest the American was of Palestinian descent.
An
anti-government activist near the bombing site confirmed the attack
to the New York Times via Skype. He also said he had seen the
American previously, but had no interaction with him. “I
know he was an American, had an American passport and that he was
with the Nusra Front,” the
activist identified only as Ahmed told the Times.
Al-Nusra
Front and other Islamic extremist groups in Syria have been trying to
identify, recruit and train Westerners (especially Americans) to
carry out attacks when they return home from fighting in the Syrian
civil war, according to senior American intelligence and
counterterrorism officials.
“There
will come a time when those fighters are going to flow out, they're
going to come back to Europe and to the United States -- and those of
us who remember history remember the flowing out of Afghanistan in
the 1980s by the fathers of al Qaeda. You can draw a line between
that and 9/11,” FBI
Director James Comey told ABC
News in
an interview last Monday. “We
are not going to allow a line to be drawn from this coming Syria
diaspora to a future 9/11."
Laith
Alkhouri, an NBC
News counterterrorism
analyst, warned that the social media, including videos of the attack
like the one below, will be used to recruit more jihadists. “There
is no doubt [the American’s] image and action will be used in
future propaganda material,”he
said..
Last
Thursday, the Justice Department asked Stephen Ponticello, a top
prosecutor in its National Security Division, to lead US efforts
aimed at stemming the flow of foreign fighters to war-torn Syria, ABC
News reported.
Most
Americans have joined the rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad.
Syria
was plunged into civil war in 2011 when peaceful uprisings against
Assad descended into violence. More than 150,000 people have been
killed and millions more have been displaced in the three years since
fighting began. The rebels are made up of a very loose coalition of
opposition groups, some of whom - like Al-Nusra Front - have openly
affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
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