Jake Sullivan grilled on Syria drone strike after US retracts claim it killed senior al Qaeda leader.

In an interview on Sunday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was questioned about an alleged civilian casualty in Syria, a father of ten who was tending sheep.

Jake Tapper of CNN questioned Sullivan about the allegedly bungled missile strike, which the Pentagon initially claimed was a successful assassination of a “senior Al Qaeda leader,” but later recanted and opened an investigation into. Sullivan stated that he was unable to comment on the matter until the conclusion of the Pentagon’s “comprehensive investigation”; instead, he praised President Biden’s record of military accountability.

“President Biden championed Secretary Austin’s guidelines for this administration to ensure accountability and oversight of any potential civilian casualties from counterterrorism strikes,” Sullivan explained. “We currently lack evidence to support the claims made about Syria. Until the conclusion of the Pentagon’s investigation, I will withhold judgment as to what actually transpired here.

Lotfi Hassan Misto, a 56-year-old father of ten who was tending to sheep at the time of his death, was slain in a May strike in Syria, according to The Washington Post. Based on interviews with Misto’s brother, son, and six others who knew him, the report concluded that he was a poor former bricklayer with no connections to terrorism.
According to interviews conducted by The Post with two unnamed military officials, the Pentagon is no longer certain that a terrorist was slain.

“We are no longer confident that we killed a senior AQ official,” a government official stated.

Although we believe the strike did not kill the intended target, we believe the individual to be a member of al Qaeda, according to the second official.

In October, the Biden administration declared a policy on counterterrorism air strikes requiring “near certainty” before attacking suspected terrorists. However, the policy pertains to countries that are not considered conventional war zones. The government considers Syria to be a conventional combat zone.