Islamic State spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir. Photo: Screen capture from video/You Tube
AIN al-BAYDAH, Syrian,— The Islamic State group’s spokesman was killed Sunday in northern Syria, a top Kurdish official said, hours after the jihadists’ leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced dead.
The official with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the autonomous Kurdish administration’s de facto army, — who asked not to be named because he is not authorised to speak on the issue — said IS spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir had been killed, after SDF chief Mazloum Abdi said he had been “targeted” in a fresh raid.
“Al-Muhajir, the right-hand of Baghdadi and the spokesman for IS, was targeted in the village of Ain al-Baydah near Jarablus, in a coordinated operation between SDF intelligence and the US army,” Abdi said on Twitter.
An AFP correspondent in Ain al-Baydah, which is controlled by Turkey-backed Syrian rebels, said two vehicles where hit by airstrikes: a small pick-up truck and a larger truck carrying a small metal container.
He saw two corpses lying outside the first vehicle while a third charred body was in the metal container.
He could not identify who was behind the strikes or if they were carried out by warplanes or a drone.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the death of al-Muhajir, saying he was among five IS members who were killed in a US-led operation backed by the SDF.
In a later post on Twitter, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said: “We believe ISIS spox. Al-Muhajir was in Jarablus to facilitate Baghdadi’s entry to Euphrates Shield area,” referring to a zone in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) controlled by Turkey’s Syria proxies.
“The two US-led operations have effectively disabled top ISIS leadership who were hiding” in northwest Syria.
“More still remain hiding in the same area,” Bali said.
Earlier on Sunday, Trump said Baghdadi was killed, dying “like a dog,” in a daring, nighttime raid by US special forces deep in northwest Syria.
Trump said that US forces killed a “large number” of IS militants during the raid, which culminated in Baghdadi cornered in a tunnel, where he detonated a suicide vest.
The operation to kill Baghdadi took place near a small village in northwestern Syria called Barisha, more than a 100 kilometres west of Ain al-Baydah.
The IS “caliphate” was eradicated in March, nearly five years after it was proclaimed by Baghdadi, largely reducing the jihadist militants to scattered sleeper cells.
At the time, the IS spokesman came out of months of silence to spur on his troops.
He had not delivered a speech since March.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of local and foreign fighters suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | AFP