00:00The U.S. has killed a terrorist with links to infamous terror group Al-Qaeda.
00:07U.S. Central Command announced the killing of Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab al-Ahmad.
00:14CENCOM said he was killed by a strike in Syria. He was not a direct member of Al-Qaeda,
00:19but rather Ansar al-Islam. That's a group with a documented history of helping Al-Qaeda
00:24plan terror attacks around the world. They were formed in an area in Iraqi Kurdistan,
00:30a remote mountainous region. I've actually done research on the ground there,
00:34in their zone. It was way up in the mountains, right on the Iranian border. And what makes this
00:39group Ansar al-Islam, which is, as you mentioned, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, what makes them unique
00:46is that they're not Arabs, like most of these terrorist groups in the Middle East.
00:50They're ethnic Kurds. Williams said they fled the region
00:54when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. He said both Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam are diminished
01:00organizations at this point. And Al-Qaeda has been decimated. So this is a blast from the past,
01:07no pun intended. And I'm heartened by this. This shows that we still have a counterterrorism
01:12presence in this very strategic zone in Syria, even though just this April, Trump decided yet again
01:22to yank the troops out of Syria. I think we've kept a small footprint there.
01:27Williams said while it's encouraging to see this, the real threat remains ISIS, especially in Syria.
01:33Syria is a historic springboard for ISIS. ISIS stands for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
01:42And, you know, we have had a president, Donald Trump, who's gotten tired of having troop deployments
01:49for some reason in Syria, but not Iraq. And he's been trying to yank them out of that country ever
01:54since 2018. And this is not good for American security. In ISIS, pledged lone wolf killed 15
02:01people in a terror attack in January in New Orleans. For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan.
02:07If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com.
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