AP, Beirut :An overnight American-led airstrike struck al-Qaida militants in northwestern Syria, the U.S. military and Syrian activists said on Thursday.The strike marked the fourth time the U.S. has targeted the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian branch, as part of its broader campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.The strike hit a storage facility controlled by the Nusra Front near the town of Harem, U.S. Central Command said in a statement. It was one of five airstrikes conducted by the coalition in Syria since Monday, the military said.U.S. Central Command said the strike targeted the so-called Khorasan group, which Washington says is a special cell within Nusra that is plotting attacks against Western interests.Inside Syria, activists and rebels dismiss the U.S. attempt to distinguish between the two, saying they are one entity. Many analysts also question the distinction.Harem is considered a strategically important border town, because it lies on a chief smuggling route to Turkey from northwestern Syria. The strike also was reported by local activists and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Observatory said the strike killed two Nusra Front fighters.The U.S. says it isn’t coordinating its aerial operation in Syria with President Bashar Assad, whose own air force has been pummeling opposition-held areas from the sky since the international coalition’s campaign began in late September.The Observatory said Wednesday that Syrian aircraft have carried out nearly 1,600 airstrikes since Oct. 20. It said at least 396 people, including 109 children, have been killed in those strikes.On Wednesday, a government strike hit the northeastern city of Raqqa, controlled by the Islamic State group, killing at least nine people, the Observatory and local activist Fourat Alwfaa said. Alwfaa said the killed were civilians.Another strike hit the town of al-Hara in southern Syria, killing eight people, including four children and a woman, the Observatory said. An activist group in Daraa also reported the strikes, but offered no casualty figures.Another report adds: Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, launched a new offensive Wednesday targeting the Islamic State group in areas of Iraq that the extremists had captured this past summer.In Diyala, the peshmerga worked with Iraqi security forces to retake the towns of Saadiya and Jalula, Yawer said. In Kirkuk, Kurdish forces backed by coalition airstrikes launched attacks to retake territory near the town of Kharbaroot, located 35 kilometers (22 miles) west of the city of Kirkuk.The offensive began as a suicide car bomber struck in the heart of Irbil, killing at least five people, officials said. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the midday attack in the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, though authorities suspected the Islamic State group. Authorities also suspected IS in three Baghdad bombings that killed at least 10 people and wounded almost 30.Turkey, while previously backing Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad, has been hesitant to aid the Kobani fight over its own fears about stoking Kurdish ambitions for an independent state. On Wednesday, Erdogan said no deal had been finalized for Turkey to train rebels under the auspices of the U.S.-led operation against IS.”If we only talk about train and equip, we would be lying to ourselves,” Erdogan said, reiterating that overthrowing Assad must be a priority as well.
