RAF drones prevented two shackled prisoners being publicly executed after wiping out armed Islamic State extremists with a Hellfire missile.
The Reaper aircraft spotted a group of jihadists in Abu Kamal, eastern Syria, mustering a large crowd of civilians in one of the town’s main streets.
‘When a van then unloaded two shackled prisoners in front of the crowd, it became clear that Daesh were organising a public execution’, the Ministry of Defence said.
There were too many civilians at the scene for the RAF crew to kill the fighters about to carry out the murders, the department said in a statement.
But the drone spotted two militants stationed as sentries on the roof of a building overlooking the scene.
A statement said: ‘A Hellfire missile was fired immediately, and scored a direct hit which not only killed one of the sentries but also brought the execution to an immediate halt, as the Daesh fighters fled the scene, and the crowd of civilians dispersed.’
The incident happened last Tuesday and was one of a series of bombing raids in Syria and Iraq by UK jets.
The attack came as in Iraq, local forces dislodged Islamic State from all but 12 square km of Mosul, a military spokesman said.
Planes dropped leaflets into the city telling civilians the battle was nearly won.
Seven months into the US-backed campaign, the militants now control only a few districts in the western half of Mosul including the Old City, where Islamic State is expected to make its last stand.
The Iraqi government is pushing to declare victory by the holy month of Ramadan, expected to begin on May 27, even if pockets of resistance remain in the Old City, according to military commanders.
A spokesman for the US-led coalition backing Iraqi forces said the enemy was completely surrounded in the city and its fighters and resources were being destroyed.
‘The enemy is on the brink of total defeat in Mosul,’ U.S. Air Force Colonel John Dorrian told a news conference in Baghdad.
With the help of advisers and air strikes by the coalition, Iraqi forces have made rapid gains since opening a new front in the northwest of Mosul earlier this month, closing in on the Old City.
Outnumbered, the militants have snipers embedded among the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in west Mosul. Many people have been killed by militants or heavy bombardments.
The leaflet dropped over Mosul also ordered civilians to immediately stop using any vehicle to avoid being mistaken for militants who have fought back against Iraqi forces with suicide car bombs and motorcycle bombs.
Source: RAF drone saves two ISIS prisoners from public execution | Daily Mail Online
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