WASHINGTON — U.S. warplanes struck an Islamic State camp in Libya early Friday, targeting a senior Tunisian operative linked to two major terrorist attacks in Tunisia last year. The operative, Noureddine Chouchane, was most likely killed in the strike, according to the Pentagon.
The airstrikes, on a camp outside Sabratha, about 50 miles west of Tripoli, killed at least 30 Islamic State recruits at the site, many of whom were believed to be from Tunisia, according to a Western official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.
The mayor of Sabratha put the death toll at 41, and he said that six others had been wounded. He said the airstrikes occurred around 3:30 a.m.
The airstrikes come as the Obama administration and its allies are considering increased military action against a growing threat in Libya by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. In November, the Americans killed Abu Nabil, also known as Wissam Najm Abd Zayd al Zubaydi, an Iraqi who led the Islamic State's arm in Libya, in an airstrike on the town of Darnah, in eastern Libya.
Chouchane was suspected of being a major Islamic State operative who helped organize an attack on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis that killed 22 people in March and another in June that killed 38 people at a beach in the coastal resort in Sousse. Chouchane was one of five fugitives for whom the Tunisian Interior Ministry issued arrest warrants after the museum attack.
The Western official said that the airstrikes Friday were focused on Chouchane and did not represent the start of major new U.S. war in a Muslim country. They were carried out by Air Force F-15E jets.
Special Operations forces, using reconnaissance drones, satellite imagery and other surveillance equipment, began monitoring the site, a walled compound, several weeks ago as Chouchane gathered several dozen recruits from Tunisia and other countries in the region for what appeared to be a training program intended to strike one or more targets, according to a second Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, to discuss military operations.
"The number of foreign fighters conducting the type of training they were doing under Chouchane's direction led us to believe they were preparing for a major attack outside of Libya, either in the region or possibly Europe," the official said.
U.S. fighter-bombers attacked buildings the recruits were using as barracks while the fighters were asleep, the official said.
Jamal Naji Zubia, the head of the foreign news media office in Tripoli, said the airstrikes targeted a farmhouse that had been seized by Islamic State militants. Most of those killed were Tunisian, he said, although one man, who died from his wounds at a hospital, appeared to be Jordanian.
Fighters had been arriving at the house for some time, Zubia said, although the exact affiliation of the group was a mystery to neighbors. "They came individually to the house from different places," he said. Some officials in the area said they believed the Tunisians had gathered at the house to hear a speech by a Muslim religious leader, he said.
The mayor of Sabratha, Hussain al-Dawadi, said the airstrikes had occurred in Qasr al-Allagh, a farming district about five miles outside the town. The bodies of 41 people were brought to the town, along with six seriously wounded people, he said.
After Islamic State fighters made a show of force in the center of Sabratha in December, Dawadi invited journalists from Tripoli to visit, denying that the group had a significant foothold in the town.
"A number of them living in a secluded area like this is, of course, suspicious," he said Friday. "It must have been a sleeper cell, not a training camp."
Tunisian and Libyan officials have in recent months warned that jihadists operating around Sabratha represented an even greater threat than the Islamic State's Libyan stronghold in Surt, about 220 miles southeast of Tripoli, because Sabratha is a strategic point on routes for smuggling men and matériel among Algeria, Libya and Tunisia.
Sabratha has been the base and training camp of the militant group Ansar al-Shariah in Tunisia, an offshoot of al-Qaida, since its leader, Seifallah bin Hussein, fled Tunisia in 2013.
Tunisian officials have frequently expressed alarm about Sabratha's emergence as a base for Ansar al-Shariah, which recruited thousands of followers in the years after the Tunisian revolution of 2011. Numerous volunteers have gone on to fight in Syria and Iraq; last year, one report put the number of Tunisian fighters in Syria at 7,000. At the end of 2014, some of those fighters publicly vowed to bring jihad to Tunisia, where a fragile democracy has been one of the few hopeful legacies of the Arab Spring.
Ansar al-Shariah in Tunisia has not declared allegiance to the Islamic State, but Tunisians from both networks share close ties. The Islamic State in Libya absorbed many Ansar al-Shariah fighters in Surt, its stronghold since 2014. Surt is part of a 150-mile strip of coastline where the Islamic State has imposed a draconian form of rule including beheadings, stonings and amputations.
Bin Hussein, also known as Abu Iyadh, was a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. He has maintained his loyalty to the core Qaida headquarters in Pakistan and, as a fierce rivalry between al-Qaida and the Islamic State for leadership of the global jihadist movement has emerged, he has sought to be a bridge between the two.
Bin Hussein was released from prison after the 2011 democratic uprising toppled the country's longtime dictator.
Accused of orchestrating the assassinations of two left-wing politicians and a violent protest against the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, he escaped to Libya in 2013, from where he has been training and recruiting fighters. He was reported killed last June in an American airstrike on Ajdabiya.
In recent months, U.S. and British Special Operations teams have increased clandestine reconnaissance missions in Libya to identify the militant leaders and to map out their networks for possible strikes.
This week, President Barack Obama said at a news conference, "With respect to Libya, I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al-Qaida wherever they appeared."
"We will continue to take actions where we've got a clear operation and a clear target in mind," Obama also said, adding, "As we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them."
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, Declan Walsh from Cairo and Carlotta Gall from Pristina, Kosovo. Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.