Was an Assault on ISIS HQ Also a Rescue Mission?

posted on: Feb 6, 2015

On January 1, there was a particularly brutal firefight in Raqqa, ISIS’s capital in Syria. According to al Jazeera, the extremist group beat back a pair of helicopters, packed with commandos that were attempting to land in Raqqa. Twenty vehicles belonging to ISIS were destroyed in the melee, a Pentagon press release later noted.

The fighting was especially tough because the stakes were especially high, according to local activists and regional reports. A Jordanian pilot had crashed in the area days before, on Christmas Eve. This was the rescue mission, they say.

“The Jordanians tried to free the pilot on Jan. 1,” Abu Ibrahim Raqqawi told The Daily Beast. Raqqawi is the name used by a member of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, a coalition of activists reporting on crimes committed by the Assad regime and ISIS activity from inside of Syria. A source close to Jordanian intelligence also told The Daily Beast that a rescue mission was mounted on January 1, but provided no details.
The kingdom of Jordan hasn’t commented officially on the alleged rescue mission while Pentagon officials told The Daily Beast that if there was an operation it did not involve the U.S. But Raqqawi’s account matches with local press reports of a hostage retrieval mission gone wrong. And Raqqawi has had an especially clear view of the Syrian conflict. While the rest of the world was still operating under the assumption that the pilot, Muadh al-Kasasbeh, was alive, Raqqawi was the first to report that Kasasbeh had in fact been killed, burned to death just days after the alleged attempt to snatch him.

“The city of al-Raqqa witnessed an unusually intense aerial campaign conducted by coalition fighter jets,” Raqqawi reported on Jan. 2.

“As the jets were pounding the area,” Raqqawi wrote, “helicopter gunships attempted to make an airborne-landing operation.”

Source: www.thedailybeast.com