Ellen Manning, Yahoo News UK 27 October 2019
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is believed to have been killed in a US military raid in Syria, according to reports. Official confirmation of the IS leader’s death has not yet been announced, but al-Baghdadi is believed to have been targeted by the raid in Syria’s Idlib province.
Newsweek quoted unnamed sources as saying the raid was carried out by special operations forces after they received “actionable intelligence”.
The White House would only say that Donald Trump will be making a “major statement” at 9am on Sunday, Washington time (1pm GMT).
The US President tweeted in the early hours of Sunday (October 27): “Something very big has just happened!”
Al-Baghdadi has led the IS terror group for the last five years and has remained at large with a £19.5 million bounty on his head despite several claims that he had been killed, which later turned out to be untrue.
He is believed to be responsible for encouraging jihadists who couldn’t travel to the caliphate to kill people where they were.
IS released a video of a man it claimed to be Baghdadi earlier this year – the first time he had been seen in five years.
Before that, the leader’s last public appearance was when he delivered a sermon at Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri in 2014 in which he declared the creation of a “caliphate” across parts of Syria and Iraq.
IS leader Baghdad is alive, releases a video to praises Sri Lanka attack
Since then he has released audio recordings, including one last month in which he called on members of IS to do all they could to free IS detainees and women held in jails and camps.
In the US, some extremists have pledged their allegiance to al-Baghdadi on social media including Tashfeen Malik, who alongside husband Syed Rizwan killed14 people and injured 22 in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015. – Yahoo news
