Eurasia Press & News
Syrian forces on Wednesday launched an operation against jihadists in a camp in the northwest region near the Turkish border in a bid to capture French fighters wanted by French authorities. Foreign jihadists who travelled to Syria to fight with Islamist militias during the civil war have fallen out of favour with the new authorities in Damascus after ex-president Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.
Syria government forces launched an operation Wednesday against jihadists holed up in a camp in the northwest, in a push to capture French fighters wanted by their government.
Troops surrounded French jihadists in the camp during the ongoing operation, said Syrian authorities, confirming a report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group that a “vast operation” was launched “to arrest French fighters wanted by their government”.
The son of a prominent French jihadist in the camp, who goes by the alias Jibril al-Mouhajir, also told AFP that “clashes erupted after midnight and are ongoing”.
Mouhajir said the French government had demanded “two French nationals from the group be handed over” to Syrian authorities.
The group of foreign jihadists, Firqatul Ghuraba, is led by Omar Omsen, also known as Omar Diaby, a former Franco-Senegalese criminal turned preacher.
The Syrian operation came after the jihadist allegedly kidnapped a girl and refused to hand himself over to the authorities.
General Ghassan Bakir, a top security commander in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, in a statement said government forces had completely surrounded the camp near the Turkish border, where the jihadist is holed up.
In September 2016, the US designated Diaby, suspected of funnelling francophone fighters to Syria, as an “international terrorist”. He is also wanted on a French arrest warrant.
Syrian forces attempted to negotiate with fighters in the camp, “but the situation appears to be deteriorating” following a mobilisation call from Omsen’s group to all foreign fighters in Syria, said FRANCE 24’s terrorism expert Wassim Nasr in a post on X.
A resident of the Harem region, where the camp is located near the Turkish border, told AFP he had seen government forces bringing reinforcements to the area beginning Tuesday and had heard explosions.
French security sources have previously told AFP that “around 50” people are believed to be part of the group of jihadists.
The Syrian civil war, which erupted in 2011 with Assad’s brutal repression of anti-government protests, killed over half a million people.
Thousands of people from Europe travelled to Syria to fight alongside jihadist groups.
Like other armed groups, Diaby’s militants appear to have fallen out of favour with Syria’s new Islamist authorities, who took power after the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December.
