Khorasan group back in US crosshairs as air strikes hit non-Isis targets in Syria

The latest round of US air strikes in Syria were focused exclusively on an offshoot of al-Qaida and did not target the Islamic State militant group at all, the US military confirmed on Thursday, raising questions about a new expansion of the war.

A strike late on Wednesday, in Syria’s north-western Idlib province, is believed to have killed a French national, David “Daoud” Drugeon, a suspected bombmaker for the Khorasan group. Khorasan, which US intelligence officials have claimed is an al-Qaida external operations arm, has not been targeted by the US since the first day of air strikes in Syria in September.

The US Central Command said it used bombers, fighter jets and drones to hit five Khorasan vehicles and buildings near the city of Sarmada, said to be “meeting and staging areas, IED-making facilities and training facilities”. It did not confirm Drugeon’s death, instead saying it was still assessing the impact of the strikes.

While nothing about Khorasan is independently known or verified, US officials assert that it is a cell of Afghans and Pakistanis within al-Qaeda’s Syrian proxy, the Nusra Front. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria’s civil war, claimed that US air strikes also hit a headquarters for a Nusra-aligned militant group, Ahrar al-Sham.

The strikes suggest the US air war in Iraq and Syria will not exclusively target Isis. All but a single strike thus far have targeted Isis – the 22 September missile barrage against Khorasan near Aleppo – and none have gone after the Nusra Front, which US intelligence officials had described early in 2014 as a greater threat than Isis.

But Nusra has recently shown signs of aligning with Isis, and this weekend routed a rebel group the US hoped to work with, the Syrian Revolutionary Front, near Idlib city. Despite leaks that the US would now target Nusra, the Pentagon said as recently as Tuesday that it had reached no final decision on attacking against the group.

Central Command, in a statement, signaled it did not seek a broader conflict with Nusra, which risks alienating Syrian rebel groups who see Nusra as a valuable force against Assad. Yet some observers interpreted it that way.

“I think America may want to stop Jabhat al-Nusra from going forward,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, the founder of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, who estimated that Nusra and its affiliates control 80% of Idlib province.

Central Command said it did not “target the Nusra Front as a whole” and said Khorasan’s focus was “not on overthrowing the Assad regime or helping the Syrian people”, but rather “taking advantage of the Syrian conflict to advance attacks against western interests.” It denied Wednesday’s attacks were a response to Nusra’s recent clashes with other Syrian opposition groups.

Several of Syria’s relatively moderate rebel factions view the Obama administration as tacitly abandoning its stated goal of removing their main enemy, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Attacking Nusra risks deepening that perception, as the US has now attacked the most potent of Assad’s enemies.

The US seeks to recruit and train those rebel factions into a proxy army capable of rolling back Isis in Syria, as President Barack Obama has ruled out has ruled out sending US soldiers and marines to oust Isis from its Syrian and Iraqi strongholds. Yet the vetting of those groups has not begun, according to the Pentagon, and training an initial force is expected to last nearly a year.

“Only Kurdish” fighters in Syria appear willing to fight against Isis as the US desires, Abdel Rahman said.

The threat to the US by Khorasan, a relatively obscure group, is in question after US officials have offered vague or conflicting descriptions of where Khorasan supposedly meant to strike and how advanced its planning was. The lack of follow-up on assaults on Khorasan fueled those questions for over a month, during which Pentagon officials have repeatedly declined to assess what the 22 September strikes accomplished.