Senior al-Qaeda commander killed in Syria airstrike

BEIRUT — Activists say a top commander in al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, al-Nusra Front, has been killed in an airstrike.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says Sanafi al-Nasr was killed Thursday in an airstrike near the northern Syrian town of Dana.

Al-Nasr was listed as an alias for Abdul Mohsen Abdullah Ibrahim al-Sharikh, a Saudi national listed as a “specially designated global terrorist” by the US Treasury Department in 2014.

The designation accused him of having served as a “senior ANF (Al-Nusra) and al-Qaeda facilitator based in Syria.”

The Observatory said two other senior Nusra figures going by the names of Abu Yasser al-Maghrebi and Abu Mohammed al-Jazrawi were also killed in the strike.

Al-Nusra’s official Twitter account for Aleppo posted a photo of a mangled car it said had been targeted in an airstrike in Al-Dana in western Aleppo.

“The planes of the Crusader-Arab coalition targeted one of the cars of the fighters in Al-Dana city in west Aleppo,” the account said.

The Observatory’s chief Rami Abdurrahman said Saturday it was not clear if al-Sharikh was killed by US or Russian warplanes.

Jihadi activists on social media say he was killed by a US drone strike.

Al-Sharikh was one of six men that the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on last year.

He has been erroneously reported dead in the past. US officials had no immediate comment on the reported deaths.

His death came three months after the US killed top al-Qaeda official Muhsin al-Fadhli. Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate is led by Abu Muhammed al-Golani.