US Central Command on Wednesday said that its forces launched an airstrike in Syria on June 19 that it claimed killed a “senior ISIS leader,” an attack that came more than two months after the US completed a withdrawal from the country.
CENTCOM identified the target as Ali Husayn al-‘Ulaywi and offered no other details about the strike. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that day that a man riding a motorcycle in the countryside of Syria’s northwest Idlib province was targeted by a drone and killed.
At the time of the report, the SOHR said the man had not been identified. Locals reported hearing several explosions in the area around the time of the attack.
The US completed a full withdrawal from Syria back in April and handed over its military bases to the Syrian government, which is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an offshoot of al-Qaeda that the US and its allies helped take power in Damascus in December 2024.
Last year, the Syrian government joined the US-led anti-ISIS coalition, and ISIS has been taking credit for attacks against Syrian government troops, though HTS and ISIS share a similar ideology, and there has historically been a lot of crossover with its members.
When President Trump returned to office in January 2025, the US had about 2,000 troops in Syria. The Trump administration began a drawdown, which was accelerated following the December 2025 attack in Palmyra, Syria, that killed two US National Guard soldiers and an American civilian interpreter.
While President Trump blamed the Palmyria attack on ISIS, the gunman was a member of Syria’s security forces, and US officials have acknowledged to The Wall Street Journal that the new Syrian military is “riddled with jihadist sympathizers, including soldiers with ties to al-Qaeda and ISIS and others who have been involved in alleged war crimes against the Kurds and Druze.”
