IS leader al-Shishani dies of wounds from US strike in Syria
The Islamic State’s ‘Emir of War’ dies of wounds suffered in U.S. airstrike
(about 1 hour later)
BAGHDAD — Top Islamic State commander and feared ethnic Chechen jihadi fighter Omar al-Shishani has died of wounds suffered in a U.S. airstrike in Syria, a senior Iraqi intelligence official and the head of a Syrian activist group said Tuesday.
Abu Omar al-Shishani, one of the Islamic State’s top commanders, has died of his wounds suffered from a U.S. airstrike in Syria earlier this month, according to the Pentagon and activist groups in the region.
Al-Shishani, who was wounded in a U.S. airstrike earlier this month, died on Monday outside the Islamic State group’s main stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, the two told The Associated Press.
“We assess he’s dead,” U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, wrote in an email.
There was no immediate confirmation of his death from the Islamic State group but the IS-affiliated Aamaq news agency denied he was killed, saying that the “he was not subjected to any injury.” The outlet quoted an unnamed “source” for the denial, without giving further details or evidence that al-Shishani was still alive.
Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a group of activists and citizen journalists reporting from within Islamic State-controlled territory, tweeted confirmation of Shishani’s death Monday night.
An American spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State group in Iraq said the alliance was also confirming the militant commander had died.
we have a confirmation that #ISIS leader Abo Omar Al-Shishani got killed by Coalition Airstrike on 04 Mar #Syria pic.twitter.com/Hi3GcPVlTT — الرقة تذبح بصمت (@Raqqa_SL) March 15, 2016
The red-bearded ethnic Chechen was one of the most prominent IS commanders, who earlier served as the group’s military commander for the territory it controls in Syria. He later became the commander of the group’s ground forces, according to Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar and author who closely follows the group.
we have a confirmation that #ISIS leader Abo Omar Al-Shishani got killed by Coalition Airstrike on 04 Mar #Syria pic.twitter.com/Hi3GcPVlTT
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.”
— الرقة تذبح بصمت (@Raqqa_SL) March 15, 2016
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.
U.S. warplanes and drones targeted Shishani, along with a group of Islamic State fighters outside the Syrian town of Shidadi in a series of strikes on March 4. Last week, Pentagon officials said they were assessing the outcome of the strike, but could not confirm that he was dead.
Al-Shishani, whose real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili, was an ethnic Chechen from the Caucasus nation of Georgia, specifically from the Pankisi Valley, a center of Georgia’s Chechen community and once a stronghold for militants.
Shidadi has been the sight of heavy fighting in recent weeks as Syrian Democratic Forces, Syrian Kurds and U.S. advisors have pushed to retake the town–a key intersection near the Iraqi border–from the Islamic State. Pentagon officials said that Shishani’s presence near Shidadi at the time of the airstrikes that ultimately killed him pointed to the significance of the town to ISIS forces.
A U.S. airstrike targeted al-Shishani on March 4 near the town of Shaddadeh in Syria, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters in a statement last week.
Shishani, also known as Omar the Chechen and by his birth name, Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili, is a Georgian-Chechen by birth and fought with Chechen militants in 2006 before joining the Georgian Army. He served in the army during Georgia’s brief war against the Russians in 2008. By 2012, the red-bearded Shishani had found his way to Syria where he fought with a number of opposition groups against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Prior to joining the Islamic State, Shishani helped opposition and Islamist forces capture Menagh Airbase from the Syrian Army. Last month, the airbase was retaken by Kurdish forces.
Al-Shishani “had been sent to Shaddadeh to bolster ISIL fighters following a series of strategic defeats,” Cook said in the statement, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State group.
In 2013, Shishani joined the Islamic State where he quickly grew to prominence as a capable battlefield commander and strategist. The U.S. Treasury named Shishani as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2014 and put a $5 million bounty out for any information that could lead to his capture or death.
The spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren said on Tuesday that the coalition was able to “assess that he is dead” and that it “got the word Monday morning.”
Shishani has been announced as dead numerous times before. Recently, in 2014, Russian officials said he had been killed fighting in Chechnya.
Warren described al-Shishani as a “very important figure,” in the Islamic State group, who was hit as part of a stepped-up campaign of U.S.-led airstrikes targeting IS leadership.
Last week, Waren told reporters 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 Shaddadeh “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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Mroue reported from Beirut. Associated Press Writers Susannah George in Baghdad and Philip Issa in Beirut contributed to this report.
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