The leader of the Islamic State (IS) group killed in a US raid late on Thursday in northwestern Syria was a veteran insider and top ideologue of the extremist movement, and is believed to have played a key role in one of its most horrific atrocities: the enslavement of thousands of women from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority.
Known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, he kept himself wrapped in mystery during his more than two years as the group’s “caliph.”
Almost no public photographs of him exist, and he never appeared in public or in IS videos.
Photo: AFP
From hiding, he led the group’s remnants as they regrouped following the downfall of their caliphate and shifted underground to wage an insurgency in Iraq and Syria.
He met his end in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib Governorate, in a house he had rented only about 24km from the safehouse where his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was hunted down by the US in a similar raid in October 2019.
Al-Qurayshi’s death comes as IS militants, after years of low-level hit-and-run ambushes, had begun to carry out bolder, higher-profile attacks.
Last month, IS fighters attacked a prison in northeast Syria to free jailed comrades, leading to a 10-day battle with Kurdish-led forces that left about 500 dead.
Al-Qurayshi’s death might disrupt the group’s momentum in the short term, but is unlikely to hurt its operations in the long term.
“It’s an organization not focused on charismatic leadership, but ideas, which is why its leaders have been pretty low-profile,” said Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I think the IS machine will continue with whoever the new leader is.”
Al-Qurayshi’s real name was Amir Mohammed Saeed Abdul-Rahman al-Mawla.
He was an Iraqi in his mid-40s, born in 1976 and believed to be an ethnic Turkmen from the northern Iraqi town of Tel Afar.
He held a degree in Islamic law from the University of Mosul.
He took the al-Qurayshi nom de guerre after being elevated to IS leader following al-Baghdadi’s death — suggesting that he, like his predecessor, claimed links to the tribe of the Prophet Mohammed.
Al-Qurayshi, like his predecessor, spent his last days in Idlib, an area held by insurgent groups, in some distance from the main theaters of war in eastern Syria and Iraq where the group once held vast swaths of territory in a self-declared “caliphate.”
He was staying in a three-story house in the town of Atmeh, near the border with Turkey.
During the early morning raid, he blew himself up, killing a number of women and children along with him, US officials said.
First responders at the scene said that 13 people, including four women and six children, were killed during the raid, during which US forces battled fighters in and around the house.
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