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Pentagon says Khorasan leader al-Nasr killed in Syria air strike

The Pentagon said Abdul Mohsen Adballah Ibrahim al Charekh, a Saudi national, was the highest-ranking leader of a secretive cell of al-Qaeda operatives called the Khorasan group.

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Cook described al-Nasr as a “long-time jihadist” and said he had experience in moving money to fund the terror network.

The Khorasan Group, made up of al-Qaeda veterans, was little known until late 2014 when the USA administration announced it was expanding its bombing campaign in Syria to target the group’s bases.

The Pentagon said U.S.-led coalition forces conducted the airstrike over northwest Syria on Thursday.

Fadhli, a Kuwaiti-born jihadi, was killed in a strike in Syria in July.

Khorasan Group is a secret outfit of al Qaeda sent from Pakistan to Syria in order to plot attacks against the West. Declassified files recovered in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound show that the al Qaeda master had ordered the creation of a committee to serve that function.

“He was a highly influential strategist and prolific online propagandist and previously played key operational roles for the terrorist organization in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and Iran, including a stint in 2012 as al Qaeda’s chief financial officer”, he said.

Also wanted in Saudi Arabia, he was designated a terrorist previous year under sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council and the US Treasury Department.

A few reports of deaths of leaders in the Khorasan Group have turned out to be false. The Long War Journal reported shortly after the airstrikes were launched that Sanafi al Nasr was a leading figure in the “Khorasan Group”.

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Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of The Long War Journal.

Senior al-Qaeda figure Sanafi al-Nasr killed in US strike