As spokesman, al-Adnani was the group’s most prominent face, the first to announce the ISIS caliphate even before Baghdadi did.
Advertisement
Adnani’s death has been rumored several times before.
Radical group of the Islamic State (ISIS) announced Tuesday the death of its official spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in Syria’s northern Aleppo province. It was not clear whether that leader was Adnani. “We are still assessing the results of the operation at this time”.
Born in Syria in 1977, al-Adnani was the most senior Syrian in ISIS, a trait that some analysts say may have counted against him in a leadership bid among the Iraqi-led terror group.
The western-backed SDF fighters bombed ISIS positions near the town of Marea in Aleppo province and was able to expel the group from a number of villages.
Advances by Iraq’s army and allied militia toward Islamic State’s most important possession of Mosul have put the group under new pressure at a moment when a US -backed coalition has cut its Syrian holdings off from the Turkish border.
Like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, Adnani is believed to have been held in USA military custody in Iraq roughly a decade ago, only to be released and help the organization survive near-extinction to reemerge later as the Islamic State.
He had been the chief propagandist for the ultra-hardline jihadist group since he declared in a June 2014 statement that it was establishing a modern-day caliphate spanning swaths of territory it had seized in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
The jihadi was identified by the US State Department in 2014 as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and described as a senior leader and official spokesman for IS and a reward of up to $5m was offered for information that would lead to him.
In a steady stream of audio messages, Adnani both set and articulated the organization’s violent agenda, repeatedly emphasizing the priority of targeting the West. Earlier this year, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, a recording attributed to Adnani called for a “month of conquest and jihad”.
In May 2016 he issued a statement calling for the execution of so-called lone-wolf attacks in countries preventing jihadis from travelling to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State.
Advertisement
He was arrested in May 2005 in Al-Anbar province and is believed to have spent some time between 2005 and 2010 at the US detention facility, Camp Bucca.
