A Frenchman, a fighter in a jihadist group in Syria, died on Sunday January 15, killed by the army of Bashar al-Assad, revealed the specialist in jihadist movements of France 24 Wassim Nasr.
Known by the nom de guerre Abou Hamza, Sofiene Merabet, originally from the city of Nice, was 28 years old.
A relative of preacher Omar Omsen
Present in Syria since 2017, he had joined the group "Firqat al Ghouraba" (the group of foreigners), led by Oumar Diaby, alias Omar Omsen, a former Franco-Senegalese delinquent who became a preacher.
Based in the Idleb region, in the northeast, considered the last pocket of resistance against Bashar al-Assad, this group today numbers 115 men, women and children, mainly French, according to Wassim Nasr.
The French jihadist was killed during battles against the army of Bashar al-Assad's regime in the region of Jabal al-Zawiya, south of Idleb, explains the journalist from France 24, who obtained the video from his funeral.
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FRENCH JIHADIST BURIAL IN SYRIA © screenshot France 24
Groups of foreign jihadists are fighting alongside the group Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (HTS), the former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, which controls part of this province with other rebel groups.
Oumar 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 him 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.
With AFP
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