[ALMANAR.LB] US officials said on Tuesday that a top leader of the so-called 'Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
of Iraq and the Levant' (ISIL) takfiri
...an adherent of takfir wal hijra, an offshoot of Salafism that regards everybody who doesn't agree with them as apostates who most be killed...
group may have been killed during a US Arclight airstrike in Syria.
Abu Omar al-Shishani, described by Pentagon as "ISIL Minister of War", is one of the most wanted terrorists, whose capture will cost a reward up to $5mn.
Born in 1986 in Georgia, Shishani was known for being a military advisor close to ISIL leader, His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
...formerly merely the head of ISIL and a veteran of the Bagram jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us...
The Arclight airstrike was carried out by war jets and unmanned aerial vehicles that targeted Shishani near the Syrian city of Al-Shadadi, and killed 12 other krazed killers, a US official said.
The US Defense Department believes that Shishani was dispatched to Shadadi to reinforce ISIL gunnies following a series of defeat they suffered last month.
"He was a Georgian national based in Syria, who chaired high ISIL posts, including the Minister of War," Peter Cook, Pentagon front man said, adding that Shishani's death will limit the ISIL's ability to coordinate attacks and defend strongholds.
"It will also limit the group's ability to recruit imported muscle, especially in Chechnya and Caucasus.
Several US officials - asked not to be named - expressed optimism following the Arclight airstrike, despite that the killing of Shishani has not been yet confirmed.
'Omar the Chechen': Notorious, Red-Bearded IS Warlord
[AnNahar] On Wednesday, a U.S. official said Shishani -- whose real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili -- "likely died" in an assault earlier this month by U.S. warplanes and drones in northeastern Syria.
| Lots of obituary information about Mr. Batirashvili at the link -- his Christian father, his time in the Georgian army -- just in case he really is dead. |
Shishani's father, Taimouraz Batirashvili, told the Russian news agency Interfax that he had no confirmation of his fate.
"I know nothing about the death of my son. They announce his death almost every month," he said.
State commander leader Omar al-Shishani, known as Omar the Chechen, was “seriously injured” in a recent strike in northeastern Syria but not killed despite US suggestions to the contrary, a monitoring group said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday that according to its sources the March 4 strike had indeed targeted the jihadist’s convoy, killing his bodyguards, while Shishani himself “was seriously injured.”
“He’s not dead,” the Observatory’s director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. “He was taken from the province of Hasake to a hospital in Raqqa province where he was treated by a jihadist doctor of European origin."
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