A French jihadist was killed in fighting between the “Firqat al Ghouraba” group of which he was a member and the Syrian army in northwestern Syria, the faction announced on Monday. “Firqat al Ghouraba” (the group of foreigners) is led by Oumar Diaby, alias Omar Omsen, a former Franco-Senegalese delinquent turned preacher.
“With pride, we announce to our dear community the news of the martyrdom of one of its heroes among the French mouhajirin (Editor’s note: emigrants), brother Abou Hamza”, announces the group in a press release on WhatsApp.
Groups of foreign jihadists are fighting alongside the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, which controls with other rebel formations part of the province of Idleb in the north-west of Syria. The group publishes photos of men wearing a shroud and putting it in the ground, and specifies that the jihadist was killed in the region of Jabal al-Zawiya, south of Idleb, “during an advance of the regime of Assad”.
The leader of his group subject to an arrest warrant
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), based in the United Kingdom and which has an extensive network of sources on the ground in Syria, the French jihadist was killed on Sunday during battles against the army. of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. He was buried Monday in this region, according to the NGO.
Diaby, who worked in 2012 in a halal snack bar in Nice (south-eastern France), had joined Syria in 2013 where he took the lead of a jihadist brigade made up of young French people, mostly from the Nice region. In September 2016, the United States called him an “international terrorist”. Given for dead, he reappeared in a shoot broadcast by France 2 in 2016. He is the subject of an arrest warrant from the French courts.