TerrorismU.S. strike kills Khorasan Group’s chief bomb-maker

U.S. airstrikes in Syria overnight successfully hit a group of al-Qaeda-affiliated militants, killing the group’s top bomb-maker.

David Drugeon, a French Islamist militant, was killed along with other Khorasan Group members near Saramada, a town eighteen miles northeast of Idlib in Syria’s northwest. Drugeon escaped an earlier U.S. airstrike, on 22 September, which was aimed to take him out.

Gen. Lloyd Austin, the Central Command commander in charge of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, speaking in an unrelated forum in Washington earlier today, said he would not discuss the strikes, but suggested Drugeon may have been targeted.

“He is clearly one of the leadership elements and one of the most dangerous elements in that organization,” Austin said. “And so any time we can take their leadership out, it’s a good thing.”

Al Arabiya reports that one U.S. official said Drugeon’s bomb-making skills were nearly as worrisome as those of Ibrahim al-Asiri, a member of al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate who has built three nonmetallic devices which were smuggled onto U.S.-bound commercial planes. None detonated.

Drudgeon was born in 1989 in Vannes on the Atlantic coast of Brittany. He grew up in a blue-collar and immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of town, where social housing dominated the landscape. Eric Pelletier, a reporter with L’Express, reports that Drugeon had a normal childhood. His father was a bus driver and his mother a secretary and committed Catholic.

His life became less steady when his parents’ divorce when he was 13, an experience many of his friends describe as traumatic for the young Drudgeon. He began acting out, and his grades at school nosedived. He began hanging out with a group of young Muslims in the neighborhood who adopted a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. Before he turned 14 he converted to Islam, changing his name to Daoud.

He traveled to Egypt to study Arabic, and traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan several times. According to Pelletier, French intelligence established that Drugeon joined a small al-Qaeda subgroup known as Jund-al-Khilafah based in the Miran Shah area of Pakistan.

In late 2013, together with several members of Jund-al-Khilafah, he moved to Syria to help form the Khorasan Group, becoming the group’s top bomb-maker.

CNN reports that the innovative Drudgeon was designing bombs made out of clothing dipped in explosive solution and explosives concealed in personal electronics.

In July, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) banned cell phones without electronic charge from airplane cabins in response to the intelligence coming in about Drudgeon’s designs, much of it fragmentary.

Army Col. Steve Warren said at the Pentagon that the strikes hit five targets at two locations. Warren said that the Khorasan Group was the pre-planned target of the strikes. The Khorasan Group, he said, “is a group of personnel, some of whom are also al-Nusra affiliated, some of whom are al-Qaeda affiliated, some of whom are affiliated with other organizations. But these strikes weren’t specifically targeting any of those other organizations. They were targeting the Khorasan group. If a terrorist happens to be a member of both groups, so be it.”

Gen. Austin noted said none of the airstrikes was aimed at al-Nusra.

U.S. officials said the targets hit last night included bomb-making facilities, training areas, and meeting locations.

The Khorasan Group is made up of al-Qaeda veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They traveled to Syria to join forces the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the Islamist group al-Qaeda favors over ISIS. U.S. intelligence officials say the Khorasan Group has been actively plotting attacks against Western targets.

One of the very first airstrikes on the first day – 8 August — of the U.S. anti-ISIS campaign, consisted of twenty Tomahawk cruise missiles and other smart bombs directed at eight Khorasan Group targets near Aleppo in northwestern Syria.