TEL AVIV — Ahmed al-Saedni, the son of Hisham al-Saedni, a senior Salafist jihadist in Gaza who died in an Israeli airstrike, was killed recently in an airstrike on the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in Syria by the international coalition led by the U.S., a senior jihadist figure in the Gaza Strip, Abou Baker al-Maqdesi, told Breitbart Jerusalem.
Fourteen-year-old Ahmed al Saedni is Hisham al-Saedni’s third son. He joined IS with his mother and two brothers in 2013 after successfully infiltrating the Sinai Peninsula from Gaza and traveling to Syria.
Ahmed isn’t the first son of al-Saedni to be killed in Syria as a result of an American coalition airstrike. His two brothers, including his older sibling, 18-year-old Waleed, were killed in an airstrike in Raqqa. The three arrived in the IS capital together with their mother who is herself a Salafist activist. Al-Maqdesi said that the fate of the mother remains unclear.
The father, Hisham, was a leader and among the first of the Salafist jihadists in the Gaza Strip associated with IS ideology. He founded the organization al-Tawhid al-Jihad after participating in the establishment of an organization with a similar name in Egypt and Jordan while he lived outside of Gaza for several years.
He returned to the Gaza Strip sometime in the middle of the 2000s and founded his organization there in 2008. He was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2012 after being accused by the Israeli military of firing rockets at Israel and planning attacks against Israel on the Israeli-Egyptian border. It was also claimed that he tried to organize the jihadist groups in the Gaza Strip under an umbrella organization.