The Islamic State jihadist group said its leader has been killed in battle, the third head of the violent extremist faction to have met a violent death.
A spokesperson for the group said Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, an Iraqi, was killed “in combat with enemies of God”, without elaborating on the date of his death or the circumstances.
The US military’s Central Command said Hashimi had been killed in an operation carried out by rebels of the Free Syrian Army in Daraa province in southern Syria in mid-October.
Daraa province is mostly controlled by Syrian government forces and rebels who have reached understandings with the regime. In mid-October, Damascus said it had launched a joint operation against IS with former rebels in the south of the province.
Using an alternative acronym for IS, the US national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said: “We welcome the announcement that another leader of Isis is no longer walking the face of the Earth.”
Speaking in an audio message, the group’s spokesperson identified the new leader as Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi.
“Qurashi” refers to a tribe of the Prophet Muhammad, from whom IS leaders must claim descent. The spokesperson did not provide details on the new leader, but said he was a “veteran” jihadist and called on all groups loyal to IS to pledge their allegiance.
After a meteoric rise in Iraq and Syria in 2014 in which IS conquered vast swathes of territory, the jihadist group’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” collapsed under a wave of offensives. IS was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, but sleeper cells of the Sunni Muslim extremist group still carry out attacks in both countries.
IS’s previous leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi, was killed in February this year in a US raid in Idlib province in northern Syria. His predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed, also in Idlib, in October 2019.
Hassan Hassan, who authored a book on IS, said one “unprecedented” but possible scenario was that Hashimi “was killed ‘accidentally’ during a raid or fighting without him being known to whoever killed him”.
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In October this year, US forces killed a “senior” IS member in a pre-dawn raid in north-eastern Syria, the US military’s Central Command said at the time. It said a later airstrike had killed two other senior IS members.
The US leads a military coalition battling IS in Syria. In July, the Pentagon said it had killed Syria’s top IS jihadist in a drone strike in the north of the country. US Central Command said he had been “one of the top five” IS leaders.
Turkey in September said security forces had arrested a “senior executive” of IS known as Abu Zeyd, whose real name was Bashar Khattab Ghazal al-Sumaidai. Turkish media said there were some indications Sumaidai might have been the IS leader.
