US-led airstrikes have killed a French jihadi based in Syria who was linked to the chief planner of November’s Islamic State atrocities in Paris and was “actively planning” new attacks, the Pentagon has said.

Pentagon spokesman Col Steve Warren named the dead man as Charaffe al-Mouadan, a French national, who he said had a direct link to the Paris attack cell leader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and was killed on 24 December.

It appeared to be the first successful targeting of anyone directly linked to the deadliest attack on civilians in France since the second world war, and in line with pledges by the US president, Barack Obama, and other western leaders that terrorism would not go unpunished.

Charaffe al-Mouadan. Photograph: Le Parisien

“Al-Mouadan was actively planning attacks against the west,” Warren said. “We will hunt Isil [Isis] leaders working to inspire attacks against US and our allies. As long as Isil external attack planners are operating, the US military will hunt them and kill them.”



Warren is the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led military operation against Isis.

Ten mid-level Isis leaders are reported to have been killed in airstrikes on Syria and Iraq over the past month, Warren said, including a UK-educated man who led some of Isis’s computer hacking programmes. Siful Haque Sujan, a Bangladeshi, died in an airstrike near Raqqa in Syria on 10 December.

“Sujan was an external operations planner who was educated as a computer systems engineer in the United Kingdom,” he said. “He supported Isil’s hacking efforts, their anti-surveillance technology and their weapons development. Now that he’s dead, Isil has lost a key link between their networks.”

Warren said he had no further details on Sujan’s time in the UK. Also among the dead were an Isis executioner and a forgery specialist. He added: “We will continue to hunt Isil leaders who are working to recruit, plan and inspire attacks against the United States and our allies.

“We’re striking at the head of this snake. We haven’t severed the head of the snake yet, and it’s still got fangs. We have to be clear about that. There’s much more fighting to do.”

The effect of the airstrikes on the Isis leadership can be seen in recent battlefield successes against the group, Warren said. The Iraqi army recently saw its first major victory against the extremist Sunni militants, declaring the capture this week of Ramadi, a provincial capital west of Baghdad which fell to Isis in May.

On Tuesday the US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Isis’s violence against Iraqi Yazidis and other religious minorities in the Middle East was genocide.

“I think I was asked this a couple months ago, and I said that term carries with it legal import, it is a very important concept and label for behaviour that deserves that name,” Clinton said in answer to a question at a meeting in Berlin, New Hampshire.

“I am now sure we have enough evidence, what is happening is genocide deliberately aimed at destroying lives and wiping out the existence of Christians and other religious minorities.”

Analysts warned, however, that neutralising leaders alone would not be enough to defeat Isis. Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to US secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, said: “With leaders it’s a deadly game of Whac-A-Mole: you kill one and others take their place. It’s a necessary but not sufficient part of any counter-terrorism strategy.”

Miller, now a Middle East expert at the Wilson Center in Washington, cautioned that official boasting about numbers killed “is eerily reminiscent of another not so successful military adventure in Vietnam”.

“Military gains have to be put in the context of serving sustainable political goals. We need to be careful of too much ‘mission accomplished’ or ‘the war on terror is over’.”

Anthony Cordesman, a security and intelligence analyst for past US administrations, said: “It is difficult to say the strategy is working. Most of these leaders historically have been people they can replace, but it is an indication that the airstrikes are more effective. But you still face the fact this war has to be won on the ground.”

Commenting on Warren’s metaphor of the head of snake, he added: “It’s an interesting concept but it hasn’t worked anywhere historically without a significant ground offensive. Previously in Iraq it weakened the opposition but it never seriously defeated it.”

News of the deaths on Tuesday followed reports from Turkey that a Briton and two Pakistanis had been arrested on suspicion of membership of the terrorist group. Earlier, police in Belgium announced the arrests of two men said to have planned attacks there.



Abaaoud, a Belgian national of Moroccan origin, was killed in a shootout in Paris a few days after the attacks that killed 130 people.

Mouadan, 27, who reportedly went by the nickname Souleymane, was a friend of gunman Samy Amimour, one of the three suicide attackers who killed 90 people at the Bataclan concert hall on 13 November.

The pair, who met in the north-eastern Paris suburb of Drancy, had reportedly spoken several times of fleeing France to wage jihad in Yemen or Afghanistan. A third man, named by French media as Samir Bouabout, was also involved. The three friends were reportedly radicalised online.

In 2012, Amimour and Mouadan were both charged with “conspiracy to commit terrorism.” Amimour was placed under judicial supervision but dropped off the radar, prompting the authorities to issue an international arrest warrant. It was later revealed he had travelled to Syria and evidently then slipped back in to France. Mouadan is believed to have left for Syria in August 2013.



Investigators turned their attention to Mouadan after one of the survivors of the Bataclan massacre said he had overheard one of the attackers – Ismaël Omar Mostefaï – refer to a man called Souleymane. According to the witness, Mostefaï asked Amimour whether he was planning to get in touch with Souleymane. Amimour said he was not, and that they would do it “their way”.



Le Parisien reported that Mouadan was a charismatic figure who had undergone firearms training in Paris starting in March 2012. Le Figaro reported on Tuesday that Mouadan had died in an airstrike on the vehicle he was travelling in. He was known in jihadist circles as Abu Soulaymane al Faransi.

Another of those killed was Abdul Qader Hakim, who Warren said facilitated Isis external operations and also had links to the Paris attack network. He was killed in Mosul on 26 December, Warren said.