BAGHDAD — A top Islamic State commander and feared Chechen jihadi fighter Omar al-Shishani has died of wounds suffered in a U.S. airstrike in Syria last week, a senior Iraqi intelligence official and the head of a Syrian activist group said Tuesday.
Al-Shishani died on Monday outside the Islamic State group’s main stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, the two told The Associated Press.
The red-bearded ethnic Chechen was one of the most prominent IS commanders, serving as the group’s military commander for the territory it controls in Syria. He may have also become the group’s overall military chief, a post that has been vacant after the Iraqi militant who once held it — known as Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Bilawi al-Anbari — was killed in the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014.
According to Rami Abdurrahman, of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which tracks the Syrian conflict through a network of activists on the ground, after al-Shishani was wounded, IS “brought a number of doctors to treat him, but they were not able to.”
Abdurrahman said al-Shishani died in a hospital in the eastern suburbs of Raqqa. The Iraqi intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the IS commander was buried in Deir el-Zour on Tuesday.
A U.S. airstrike targeted al-Shishani on March 4th near the town of al-Shaddadi in Syria, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters in a statement last week.
Al-Shishani “had been sent to al-Shaddadi to bolster ISIL fighters following a series of strategic defeats,” Cook said in the statement, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State group.
U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against IS, told reporters on Friday that the airstrike that targeted al-Shishani was part of a series of stepped-up coalition strikes targeting IS leadership.
Al-Shishani was in the area of al-Shaddadi “along with about a dozen other fighters who were in one spot … and we struck it,” Warren said at the time.
The extremist IS group, which emerged from al-Qaida’s branch in Iraq, has many Iraqis among its top leaders. It blitzes across much of Iraq in the summer of 2014, capturing vast swaths of the country’s north and west. It also exploited the chaos of Syria’s civil war to seize large chunks of territory there as well and declared an Islamic self-styled “caliphate” on the territory it controls in both countries.
It subsequently drew hundreds of foreign fighters into its operations in Syria. The United Nations estimated that around 30,000 so-called foreign fighters from 100 countries are actively working with the Islamic State, al-Qaida or other extremist groups. An earlier estimate by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, a think-tank at King’s College London, said IS fighters include 3,300 Western Europeans and 100 or so Americans.
Yet despite the U.S.-led campaign of coalition airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria, IS still controls large areas, including Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul and also Raqqa, the group’s main stronghold in Syria.
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