Charaffe al Mouadan: Isis leader with alleged links to Paris attacks killed in coalition air strike, says Pentagon

An Isis leader with direct links to the planner of last month’s Paris attacks has been killed in an air strike in Syria.

Charaffe al-Mouadan, who was killed on Christmas Eve, was plotting further terror attacks on the West, a US military spokesman said.

“He was a Syrian-based Isis member with a direct link to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Paris attacks cell leader,” said Colonel Steve Warren. “We will hunt [Isis] leaders working to inspire attacks against the US and our allies. As long as Isis external-attack planners are operating, the US military will hunt them and kill them.”

According to Col Warren, 10 Isis leaders have been killed by the US or its allies within the last month, several of them linked to the Paris massacres that killed 129 people. Abaaoud, a Belgian of Moroccan origin, was killed when special forces raided an apartment in Paris a few days after the attacks.

The death of al-Moudan was announced as Belgian authorities said that they had arrested two men and seized military-type uniforms and Isis propaganda during raids carried out in connection with a suspected plot to unleash holiday attacks against police and locations in Brussels. The attacks under preparation “were the same style as those perpetrated in Paris”, according to an internal document from Belgian state-security services that was cited by the country’s RTBF French-language television.

The two suspects were arrested in the wake of searches in the Brussels area, the eastern Liege region and Flemish Brabant, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement

Numerous suspects in the Paris attacks, including Abaaoud, suicide bombers Bilal Hadfi and Brahim Abdeslam and the latter’s fugitive brother Saleh Abdeslam, were Brussels residents or had ties to the city.

Al-Mouadan, 27, who reportedly went by the nickname “Souleymane”, was said to be a friend of Paris gunman Samy Amimour, one of the three attackers who killed 90 people at the Bataclan concert hall on 13 November. The pair are alleged to have met in the Paris suburb of Drancy before al-Mouada left for Syria in 2013.

Another of those killed in the air strikes was Abdul Qader Hakim, who facilitated the militants’ external operations and had links to the Paris-attacks network, Col Warren said. He died in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Boxing Day.

Col Warren claimed that the effect of the air strikes on the Isis leadership could be seen in recent battlefield successes against the group. The Iraqi army recently saw its first major victory against the hardline Sunni militants, declaring the capture this week of Ramadi, a provincial capital west of Baghdad which fell to Islamic State in May.

“Part of those successes is attributable to the fact that the organisation is losing its leadership,” Col Warren said. But, he warned, “it’s still got fangs”.

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, visited Ramadi today. Security sources said Mr Abadi had arrived by helicopter at the Anbar University complex in the city’s southern outskirts and would meet with commanders from Iraq’s army and counter-terrorism forces, which spearheaded the offensive. He separately declared tomorrow a national holiday in celebration.

The announcement came as it emerged British air strikes were thought to have killed Isis militants in Syria for the first time since the UK’s operations started in the country four weeks ago.