Islamic State captures Jordan pilot downed over Syria

Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took a Jordanian pilot captive after his warplane came down in northeast Syria on Wednesday, the first captive taken from the U.S.-led coalition battling the armed group.

Jordan's armed forces said one of its pilots had been captured after a coalition air raid over the province of Raqqa.

"Jordan holds the group [ISIL] and its supporters responsible for the safety of the pilot and his life," a statement read on state television said.

It did not say whether the plane had been shot down but said it had crashed during a Jordanian air force "military mission against the hideouts of the terrorist group".

U.S. officials said no U.S. aircraft or personnel had been involved in the incident and the cause of the crash was unknown.

The Jordanian statement described ISIL as a "group that does not conceal its terrorist plots, committing many criminal acts from wanton destruction to killing innocent Muslims and non-Muslims in Syria and Iraq."

ISIL social media published pictures appearing to show the pilot being held by the group's fighters and images of what they said was his Jordanian military identification card.

The images were verified by two relatives contacted by Reuters who said they had been notified by the head of the Jordanian air force the pilot is 1st Lt. Moaz al-Kassasbeh, 27. The army separately confirmed his name.

A friend said Kassasbeh, who is from a prominent Jordanian family, was fervent in his commitment to his mission and felt it was a religious duty to fight groups such as ISIL that were "distorting the true spirit of Islam."

One of the published images showed the pilot, wearing a white shirt, being led out of water by armed fighters. Another showed him on land surrounded by at least a dozen fighters in military fatigues and equipped with assault rifles.

Jordan is one of the countries in the U.S.-led coalition that has been bombing ISIL targets in Syria since September. The staunch U.S. ally has provided a logistics base for the air campaign and is a hub for intelligence-gathering operations against the armed group, a Western diplomatic source said.

King Abdullah has been in the forefront of regional U.S. allies supportive of the campaign but has said radical Sunni extremists cannot defeated by military means alone and their ideology must be confronted with reason.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have also joined or supported the strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, according to U.S. Central Command.

Raqqa province, which borders Turkey, is almost entirely under the control of ISIL fighters. Boosted by arms seized in Iraq, the group evicted most rival rebels from the province earlier this year and took control of a string of government military bases over the summer, including an air base.

The U.S. is also bombing ISIL targets in Iraq, where the group has seized swaths of territory.

Reuters