15 March 2016

Shishani dead, maybe


The BBC has an article about another ISIS leader, killed (maybe) by a US airstrike:
A senior commander of the Islamic State (IS) is dead, according to the Pentagon.
Defense officials said Omar Shishani (photo) died from injuries sustained in a recent US air strike in north-eastern Syria.
Earlier reports had suggested Shishani, a Georgian whose real name was Tarkhan Batirashvili, may have survived the attack. Several of his bodyguards were killed in the same bombing.
The strike took place on 4 March 2016 near the north-eastern town of Shaddadi, where Shishani had reportedly been sent to bolster local IS forces.
A Pentagon spokesman confirmed to the BBC that the latest assessment was that "he is dead". A monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the IS leader had been "clinically dead" for several days.
Last year, the US offered a five million dollar reward for Shishani. It said he had held numerous senior military positions within the group, including "Minister of War".
Last week, the Observatory's director, Rami Abdul Rahman, quoted sources saying that Shishani had been badly wounded and had been taken to a hospital in Raqqa province where he was treated by "a jihadist doctor of European origin".
American officials have said they believe Shishani was sent to the Shaddadi area to reinforce IS militants following a series of military defeats.
Shaddadi was captured last month by the Syrian Arab Coalition, an alliance of Arab rebel groups which joined forces with the Kurdish YPG militia to battle IS.
Rico says that bad beard was enough to kill him for, but Yahoo has a follow-up denial:
A news agency that supports the Islamic State has denied reports that the group's senior operative Abu Omar al-Shishani (the Chechen) had been killed or wounded.
Amaq agency quoted a source saying Shishani, described by the Pentagon as Islamic State's Minister of War, "had not been exposed to any injury".
Last week American officials said Shishani was likely killed in an air strike. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said he had been gravely wounded and moved to the group's operations base in the city of Raqqa, but died on Monday.
Islamic State has not issued a formal statement on Shishani, thus it was not possible to independently establish his condition.
Born in 1986 in Georgia, then still part of the Soviet Union, the red-bearded Shishani had a reputation as a close military adviser to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

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