The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) has announced the death of its top-ranking Lt. Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who was allegedly being groomed to succeed the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, while he served as the jihadi organization’s chief propagandist and strategist for external terror operations.
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Al-Adnani was one of the US top targets among ISIS’s leadership, overseeing the group’s elaborate propaganda operations and credited with masterminding its strategy of staging terror attacks overseas, including the November 13 Paris attacks and the airport attacks in Brussels and Istanbul.
“We have no information to support Russia’s claim that they carried out a strike against Adnani”, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook said during a Pentagon briefing. A Russian Su-34 bomber reportedly carried out a strike in the area of Ma’arat Umm Hawsh, which is also north of Aleppo but more than 20 miles west of al-Bab, killing al-Adnani and around 40 other people.
Cook had previously said Russia’s strategy in Syria has not focused on attacking ISIS leadership.
A powerful orator, he went on to become the voice of IS.
Adnani, a Syrian born in 1977, was one of IS’s most recognised leaders, at the heart of a sophisticated propaganda and recruitment machine that produced slick videos and sustained a huge social media presence.
He allegedly carried out many high-profile attacks overseas that killed hundreds, including in Paris and Istanbul.
The IS-run Aamaq news agency said Abu Muhammed al-Adnani was “martyred while surveying the operations to repel the military campaigns in Aleppo”, and vowed to avenge his death.
The Pentagon said an air strike had targeted Adnani in the town of al Bab and the results were being assessed.
Al-Adnani is the second high-ranking Islamic State official to be killed in recent months after Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili, also known as Abu Umar al-Shishani, was killed by a USA airstrike in March. And I would just note that from the start, Russia, as you know, has spent most of its time, its military campaign supporting and propping up the Assad regime.
A USA defense official dismissed that assertion.
Asked whether the MOU was used before the strike to alert Russian Federation to clear the airspace, Cook said that he did not know.
Adnani was reported to have been seriously injured eight months ago in Iraq, during fighting near the city of Haditha.
Adnani had pledged allegiance to al-Qaida, the group from which Daesh splintered, more than a decade ago and was once imprisoned by United States forces in Iraq, according to the Brookings Institution.
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It was Al Adnani who, in a June 2014 audio recording, declared ISIL’s establishment of a “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq, and Al Baghdadi as the “leader of Muslims everywhere”.
