Pentagon Says It Killed Senior Khorasan Figure — Again

The Defense Department said Tuesday that the United States killed the leader of an al Qaeda offshoot in Syria earlier this month. But a top terrorism analyst believes there’s an even more powerful commander of the so-called Khorasan Group who must still be reckoned with.

The July 8 “kinetic strike” near Sarmada, close to Syria’s northwest border with Turkey, targeted a vehicle in which Muhsin al-Fadhli was riding, said Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis on Tuesday. Fadhli, who has been reported as killed before, was “the leader of a network of veteran al Qaeda operatives” that is plotting attacks against the United States and its allies, Davis said in a statement.

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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that the Khorasan Group is so secretive that Fadhli’s exact position in the leadership structure remained unclear. “The information I have does not place him as the leader of the Khorasan Group, but rather the leader of their external operations wing,” Gartenstein-Ross told Foreign Policy, adding that Fadhli’s relative youth — he was reportedly 34 — made it unlikely that al Qaeda would place him in overall charge of the group. “It’s unlikely that he’s actually the emir of the organization,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “The actual leader … is Mohammed Islambouli, who’s a more veteran [jihadi].”

Fadhli’s death will probably not be a major long-term blow, Gartenstein-Ross said. “Organizations like the Khorasan Group tend to build in resiliency,” he said, and the group is likely to “have replacements waiting in the wings.” However, there are exceptions to that rule, he noted, citing the effect that the 2011 drone strike in Yemen, which killed American jihadi Anwar al-Awlaki, has had on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. While AQAP quickly replaced Awlaki, the Yemeni al Qaeda franchise “hasn’t gotten as inspirational a figure since,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

However, Gartenstein-Ross cautioned that the Khorasan Group’s secretive nature makes it impossible to predict the effect of Fadhli’s death with any certainty. “Within the world of clandestine actors, the Khorasan Group is particularly clandestine,” he said.

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