WASHINGTON: The US State Department banned a senior member of the Islamic State (IS) yesterday as the United States sharply intensified its new bombing campaign in Iraq.
The designation came as US fighter jets, bombers and drones yesterday launched 15 strikes against Isis positions around one of Iraq’s most important pieces of infrastructure, a third day of support for a difficult effort by Iraqi forces to retake the Mosul Dam that has doubled the lethal US strike total.
Now banned from any financial dealings in the United States or with people in the United States is the group’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed Al Adnani, a Syrian whose given name is Taha Sobhi Falaha. Also banned was Said Arif, an Algerian member of the rival Nusra Front who escaped house arrest in France and was linked to a plot to bomb the Eiffel Tower.
The designations, which followed sanctions by the United Nations Security Council on the two IS and Nusra members and four others, do not explicitly authorise military targeting of the banned IS members. But they come as the US military sharply stepped up its air attacks on IS positions by a critical dam, a departure by degree from the previous rounds of US air strikes.
The US Central Command announced that a mix of manned and unmanned warplanes yesterday destroyed “nine IS fighting positions”, a checkpoint, an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a truck, an “emplacement belt” for homemade bombs, and at least seven IS vehicles. Over the past 10 days, US warplanes have launched 68 air strikes. Central Command said yesterday that 35 of them have come “in support of Iraqi forces near the Mosul Dam”.
The State Department described Adnani, the IS spokesman, as among “the first foreign fighters to oppose Coalition forces in Iraq”. It said Arif had fled house arrest in France last year to join an IS rival in Syria, the Al Qaida-aligned Nusra Front, after Arif had been convicted of involvement in a 2006 plot to assault French malls, police stations and the Eiffel Tower.
THE GUARDIAN
