Russia Claims It May Have Killed ISIS Leader Al-Baghdadi
Moscow (June 16, 2017): Moscow has claimed that its forces may have killed Islamic State Leader Abu Bakar Al-Baghdadi during an air strike in Syria last month; hence Washington said it could not corroborate the death.
The Russian defence ministry says it believes it may have killed the Isis leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in an air strike south of Raqqa, Syria. In a statement, the ministry said it was still seeking confirmation following the strike in late May.
The air strike targeted a meeting of Isis leaders on 28 May, Russian news agencies cited the defence ministry as saying.
The secretive Islamic State leader has frequently been reported killed or wounded since he declared a caliphate to rule over all Muslims from a mosque in Mosul in 2014, after leading his fighters on a sweep through northern Iraq.
If the report does prove true, it would be one of the biggest blows yet to Islamic State, which is trying to defend its shrinking territory against an array of forces backed by regional and global powers in both Syria and Iraq.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Russia has not yet confirmed the death of Baghdadi, and warned against exaggerating the significance of his possible demise. He said the “beheading of terrorist groups has always been presented with great enthusiasm, however, history shows that the fighting capacity of these structures [terror groups] were then restored” afterwards.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on its Facebook page that it was checking information that Baghdadi was killed in the strike on the outskirts of Raqqa in Syria, launched after Russia received intelligence about a meeting of Islamic State leaders.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Petrov declined to comment on the reports, saying only that that Russian President Vladimir Putin received reports from the ministry on a regular basis.
U.S. Navy Captain Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “We have no information to corroborate those reports.”
The statement from the Russian defence ministry claimed the 28 May strike killed around 30 mid-level Isis leaders and another 300 fighters, during a meeting of Isis’s “military council” on the southern outskirts of Raqqa. The jihadi group’s de-facto capital is surrounded to the north, east and west by advancing Syrian rebel and Kurdish forces backed by the US-led coalition.
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