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| Douglas McCain |
An American named Douglas McCain was killed last weekend in Syria, where he was fighting for ISIS, two U.S. officials told CNN.
The man's uncle, Ken McCain, said that his nephew had gone to fight as a jihadi and that the U.S. State Department told the family Monday about the death.
He died in a battle between rival extremist groups in the suburbs of Aleppo, Syria's once-bustling commercial capital and largest city, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that monitors the conflict.
Like the U.S. officials, the group described McCain as an ISIS fighter and said he was killed in a battle with the al-Nusra Front, an al Qaeda-linked organization that the U.S. government has blacklisted as a foreign terror organization.
According to his uncle, Douglas McCain's journey to Syria began sometime after he converted several years ago from Christianity to Islam.
The family wasn't alarmed by his conversion, but they became aware of Facebook posts sympathetic to ISIS, an Islamist terror group, when he traveled to what they believed to be Turkey.
U.S. counter terrorism investigators had been looking into Douglas McCain's activities for some time before his death, one U.S. official said.
He was among a list of Americans who are believed to have joined militant groups and who would be stopped and subjected to additional scrutiny if he traveled, according to the official.
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