Airstrike takes out agent who defected

WASHINGTON – A Frenchman who’d escaped at least two earlier U.S.-led attempts on his life for defecting to al-Qaida died in a July airstrike, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

David Drugeon, who’d converted to Islam and changed his first name to Daoud in his teens after becoming radicalized in French and Egyptian mosques, was killed July 5 in a strike near Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city in the country’s northwestern region and the site of fierce fighting in its more than four-year civil war.

“He was specifically targeted,” Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

Analysts said Drugeon’s death was significant because he’d become a master bomb-maker who specialized in assembling plastic explosives and because he symbolized the hundreds of Europeans who have become radical Muslims and joined al-Qaida, the Islamic State or other militant groups.

Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said that Drugeon, 25, was a member of the Khorasan Group, a small cell of experienced al Qaida militants who have coordinated with Nusra Front, Syria’s main al-Qaida affiliate.

“As an explosives expert, he trained other extremists in Syria and sought to plan external attacks against Western targets,” Cook told reporters at a briefing. “This action will degrade and disrupt ongoing external operations of al Qaida against the United States, its allies and its partners.”

Drugeon was a Frenchman who’d defected to al-Qaida after receiving military and intelligence training from France in the apparent hope of planting him inside the radical group and using him as an informant.