Russia’s defense ministry said today in a statement that Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was among roughly 40 ISIS fighters killed when a Russian Su-34 bomber struck a large group of ISIS militants in Maaratat-Um-Haush in northern Aleppo province.
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A Russian air strike in Syria killed the chief strategist of so-called Islamic State (IS), the defence ministry in Moscow has said.
The city of Aleppo, and the northern province of the same name, are regularly targeted by Russian and Syrian warplanes, as well aircraft belonging to the USA -led coalition fighting Islamic State.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook, using an alternative name for IS, said a coalition air strike near Al-Bab had targeted Adnani, describing him as the “principal architect of ISIL’s external operations and”.
One of the group’s founder members, Adnani was born Taha Sobhi Falaha in the northern Syrian town of Banash in 1977.
Russia´s military said one of its air strikes had killed Adnani in a bombing raid Tuesday that left up to 40 Daesh militants dead – a claim dismissed by USA officials as “a joke”.
Adnani, from the western Syrian province of Idlib, joined the jihadist movement in Iraq where he served under the late local al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The United States and its coalition partners carried out a strike on Tuesday against Adnani, one of the last living senior members of the Islamic State militant group.
When Osama bin Laden, whom USA special forces killed in 2011, felt the need to cull the Al-Qaeda leadership of high-profile operatives who had outlived their usefulness or were suffering from fatigue, he would get rid of them by arranging for USA intelligence to be tipped off about their whereabouts.
Both IS’s second-in-command, Abd ar-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, and its top military commander, Omar al-Shishani, have been killed in U.S. strikes since March. Officials are still assessing the results of that precision action, he said.
Even after announcing al-Adnani’s death, ISIS’s Amaq media agency boasted of the group’s resilience.
“The blood of the sheikhs will only make it more firm on the path of jihad and determination to take revenge and assault”, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. He crossed the border and joined al-Qaeda in Iraq, a precursor to ISIS, after the 2003 USA -led invasion.
Russian Federation has been flying its own bombing campaign in Syria in support of leader Bashar al-Assad since a year ago, but this is the first time they have claimed to have killed a top-ranking ISIS leader.
The increasingly crowded airspace over Syria also has approached the point of worldwide crisis, as evidenced last November when Turkey shot down a Russian jet for reportedly crossing into its airspace.
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“Adnani was a legacy AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) member, a Shura council member and the most publicly recognizable official in ISIL”, the official said.
