It still controls Mosul, but Iraqi forces are gearing up for a long-awaited operation to retake the country’s second largest city.
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The U.S. has not given details on the nature of the strike, but a standard strike release presented daily by the U.S. -led operation against ISIS includes that “a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed a vehicle” in Washiyah, Syria – a city “near Al Bab”.
Russian Federation has been flying its own bombing campaign in Syria in support of leader Bashar al-Assad since past year, but this is the first time they have claimed to have killed a top-ranking ISIS leader.
Analysts have described Adnani as a key figure in the jihadist group. The U.S. has limited its involvement to attacking Islamic State group positions.
“He was the strategic leader of the organization, especially when it comes to attacks on the West”, said journalist Graeme Wood, Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This, in part, was Adnani’s legacy.
On Tuesday, Amaq, a news outlet affiliated with the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, announced the death of Adnani, saying he was killed “while surveying operations to repel the military campaigns against Aleppo” in northern Syria.
In an online edition of the Islamic State’s newspaper al-Naba, distributed hours after al-Adnani’s death was confirmed, the group told its fighters to keep fighting. The Pentagon has not confirmed Adnani’s death. Such U.S. assessments often take days and often lag behind official announcements by militant groups.
Adnani hails from the Idlib countryside in northwest Syria. The northwest has become both the most active theater of Syria’s war and an arena for competing regional and global powers.
The Islamic State group has suffered a string of defeats in recent weeks, including in Aleppo province, where Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels drove IS out of the border town of Jarablus last week.
A few streets surrounded by fields, it will be the site, says Islamic prophecy, of a final battle between Muslims and infidels that will herald the apocalypse.
ISIS has not revealed his cause of death and said it “determined to seek revenge” for the killing.
“But again, we have no information at this time to support the claim that they also conducted a strike in this way”, he said, stressing a “rigorous process” was underway to review the strike. His group said it was behind deadly attacks in Paris, Nice and Brussels.
Experts have warned of a possible increase in jihadist attacks in the West as IS faces growing pressure in Syria, where USA officials estimate the group has lost 20 percent of the territory it once held, and in Iraq, where it has lost about 50 percent. He said things like, ‘If you can’t shoot them, then stab them, and if you can’t stab them, then crush their heads with rocks.
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Al-Adnani was one of the first to pledge allegiance to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded the precursor of IS after the US -led invasion of Iraq.
