The British woman who fled her home to join the Islamic State has reportedly been killed.
Sally Jones — also known as the "White Widow"— was killed by a US drone strike in Syria this June, CIA agents told UK operatives, the Sun reported on Wednesday night.
The US Air Force Predator strike took place near the Syria-Iraq border, the newspaper said.
A Whitehall source told The Sun: "The Americans zapped her trying to get away from Raqqa. Quite frankly, it’s good riddance."
Jones, 50, took her son Jojo and left her home in Chatham, Kent, for Syria to join her husband Junaid Hussain in 2013. Hussain, a British computer hacker from Birmingham, was killed by a US airstrike in 2015.
Jojo, 12, was believed to be travelling with Jones at the time and may also have been killed in the strike. Jones is said to have frequently used Jojo as a human shield against drone strikes in the past. The US government could face repercussions if it is responsible for Jojo's death, The Sun said.
US intelligence chiefs were "confident" that Jones had died but could not be completely certain because there was no way of retrieving DNA from the ground. Many ISIS militants have reappeared after their reported deaths.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reclusive ISIS leader, has been reported dead multiple times in the past, including by the influential UK-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights this July. The terror group has since cast doubts on the claim by releasing a recording of their leader this September, possibly to quell rumours of his death and to motivate the group's followers, according to the New York Times.
Jones, a former punk musician, frequently recruited young women and spread ISIS propaganda online. She was setting up all-female terrorist cells to attack Western countries, The Times of London reported. She was marked as a "high priority" on the US's kill list earlier this year, the newspaper added.
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