After nearly a week of drones circulating in the skies above Qah, a village near the Turkish Syrian border that hosts a large IDP population, the peace was broken when an armed drone fired a missile on a motorcycle Friday evening. The Syrian Civil Defense (SCD), the White Helmets, said that its teams “responded and were able to put out the fire resulting from the strike and secured the site to protect civilians.”
There have been conflicting reports as to the identities of the two men, whose bodies were said to be heavily burned making identifying them difficult. However early reports allege one was an Uzbek national and the other Syrian while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that an “attack committed by an International Coalition drone on a motorbike on Qah … kills two Jihadists one of them Iraqi.”
While the US has not yet commented on the attack it is widely suspected that the was from a coalition drone. According to local sources, the targets belonged to an Al-Qaeda (AQ) affiliated group, Hurras al-Din (HD). Although the US has not claimed responsibility, it did target Abu Hamza al-Yemeni, last June in a similar strike, who was in the same border region and was traveling on a motorcycle, leading many to believe this recent strike is no different.
