A deputy to the leader of the Islamic State (IS) was killed in a US airstrike in Iraq this week, the White House announced on Friday.
The IS militant, Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, also known as Hajji Mutazz, was killed on Tuesday while traveling in a vehicle near Mosul, according to a statement from the National Security Council. US President Barack Obama’s administration described al-Hayali as the IS’ “Baghdad military emir and the emir of Ninawa province.”
Al-Hayali has been declared dead before, including as recently as December.
“This time we are 100 percent certain,” a senior official with the US-led coalition that is fighting the IS said.
“We have multiple confirmations he was in the car at the moment of the strike,” the official said.
An IS media operative known as Abu Abdullah was also killed in the airstrike, officials said.
The administration said al-Hayali was a member of the IS’ Shura council, or Cabinet, and was the senior deputy to the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He was a primary coordinator for moving large amounts of explosives, weapons, vehicles and people between Iraq and Syria, the administration said, and he supported IS operations in both countries.
Coalition officials said that on Aug. 3 last year, al-Hayali led an offensive on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq, the traditional home of the Yazidi religious minority.
The killing of al-Hayali — who a US Defense Department official said helped plan the group’s successful offensive in Mosul in June — struck a blow to the IS’ operations, the administration said, “given that his influence spanned IS’ finance, media, operations and logistics,” the official said.
The US and its coalition partners have for months been conducting airstrikes on IS targets in Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, where the IS has taken control of a number of cities and towns like Mosul and Ramadi, US war planes have targeted senior leaders as part of what the White House calls its effort to “degrade and destroy” the militant group.
Since the airstrikes began last year, the US military has killed several of al-Baghdadi’s deputies, including the militant group’s conduit for outreach to extremists in North Africa and a middle-level IS leader who Pentagon officials described as the group’s “emir of oil and gas.”
After most of the targeted killings, however, the operatives have been replaced fairly quickly and Pentagon officials acknowledged that it would probably be the case again.
“This is not Baghdadi,” one Defense Department official said.
Counterterrorism experts said the IS had created an organic structure that inures it to the death of any single leader.
Like several other IS leaders, al-Hayali served in the military of Saddam Hussein and was purged after the US-led invasion, according to Will McCants, a scholar of militant Islam at the Brookings Institution. Al-Hayali later joined al-Qaeda in Iraq and was arrested and incarcerated at Camp Bucca in Iraq, where al-Baghdadi, the self-described caliph of the IS, was also detained.
Al-Hayali “rose through the Islamic State’s ranks with Baghdadi, so the caliph has lost a capable and trusted lieutenant, if the report of his death is true,” McCants wrote in an email.
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