Top story: British extremist Sally Jones believed killed
Hello there – it’s Warren Murray bringing you the news on a Thursday morning.
Sally Jones, a British Isis member sometimes dubbed the “white widow”, has been killed along with her 12-year-old son Jojo in Syria, it is believed.
Reports say the CIA told its UK counterparts that the mother and son died in a June airstrike by a Predator drone near the Iraqi border. Such news is difficult to confirm categorically – Isis fighters are sometimes declared killed, only to reappear later – but our defence correspondent Ewen MacAskill writes that there is confidence Jones is dead.
Jones, originally from London and then Chatham in Kent, went to Syria in 2013 to join her husband and fellow Briton Junaid Hussain. She became an online propagandist and recruiter for Isis. Hussain was killed in a US drone strike in 2015. Samantha Lewthwaite, another British woman who became an Isis fugitive, is also known as the “white widow” – she was married to the 7/7 attacker Germaine Lindsay.
Apart from it being a heartbreaking thought, questions have understandably been raised over the morality and legality of killing a boy of 12 in a drone strike. Major General Chip Chapman, the former head of counter-terrorism at the Ministry of Defence, said Sally Jones would have been a “significant” target but under UN charters Jojo was too young to be regarded as a soldier. “Even if he got up to really bad things, he shouldn’t have been targeted. We don’t know for sure whether he was with her or not.”
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The question remains – The new game in town is ask a Tory cabinet member whether they would vote for Brexit now. Liz Truss and Jeremy Hunt say they would. Karen Bradley, the culture secretary, has followed her PM’s lead with an equivocal answer, though she did say that given we’re leaving anyway, “I guess you would say [I am] leave”. Theresa May, meanwhile, has drawn her line in the fudge and is sticking to it – telling prime minister’s questions that “there is no second referendum, the people of the United Kingdom voted and we will be leaving the European Union in March 2019”. The game continues.
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‘The devastation is enormous’ – Wildfires in California have claimed an estimated 24 lives as of this morning as they continue to blacken large areas of the US state. Thirteen of the fatalities occurred in Napa and Sonoma counties, about an hour north of San Francisco, and the others in the state’s northern and eastern reaches.
Tens of thousands of people have headed to evacuation centres across the region, with more leaving their homes as new areas are threatened. Officials say hundreds of people have been reported missing and they expect the death toll to rise.
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