Khaled al-Masoud, who was killed at his home during a raid in the town of al-Dumayr in the Damascus countryside. (Courtesy of the al-Masoud family via AP)
A joint raid by the US forces and a local Syrian group targeting an Islamic State (IS) militant instead resulted in the killing of a man who had allegedly been working undercover to gather intelligence on the jihadist organisation, his family and Syrian officials told The Associated Press.Khaled al-Masoud was killed on October 19 during the operation in Dumayr, a town east of Damascus, the Syrian capital.According to his relatives, al-Masoud had spent years spying on IS — first for the insurgent forces led by Ahmed al-Sharaa and later for al-Sharaa’s interim government, which was formed in January following the ouster of then-President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.Local residents told AP that the US troops carried out the raid alongside the Syrian Free Army (SFA), a US-trained opposition faction that once fought against Assad and now operates under the Syrian Defense Ministry.Residents recall raidAt around 3 am on October 19, residents woke to the sound of heavy vehicles and planes.Al-Masoud’s cousin, Abdel Kareem Masoud, recalled opening his door to find Humvees bearing American flags. “There was someone on top of one of them who spoke broken Arabic, pointed a machine gun at us with a green laser, and told us to go back inside,” he recounted.The victim’s mother, Sabah al-Sheikh al-Kilani, alleged that the forces then surrounded her son’s house next door — where he was staying with his wife and five daughters — and banged on the door. According to her, al-Masoud was shot despite telling the troops he worked with General Security, an Interior Ministry force. She claimed he was taken away while wounded. Later, government security officials informed the family he had been released but was in a hospital. The family was subsequently called to collect his body. The exact time and cause of his death remain unclear.“How did he die? We don’t know. I want the people who took him from his children to be held accountable,” she said.The family believes he was targeted on the basis of “faulty intelligence” provided by SFA members.Al-Masoud had previously worked with Ahmed al-Sharaa’s insurgent group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in its Idlib stronghold before Assad’s fall, his cousin said. After returning to Dumayr, he served in the security apparatus of al-Sharaa’s interim government.Following the operation, early media reports claimed an “IS official” had been captured. However, the US Central Command — which routinely issues statements on operations that kill or detain IS members in Syria — made no announcement about the incident.Fewer than 1,000 US troops are believed to be operating in Syria, conducting airstrikes and ground raids against IS cells. They work primarily alongside the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast and with the SFA in the south.