New head of ISIS led genocide

The new leader of Islamic State was named yesterday as a former member of al Qaeda in Iraq who led the torture and slaughter of thousands of Yazidis.

Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-mawli, a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, was put on the official blacklist of terrorists by the US government – with a US$5 million reward offered for information leading to his capture.

Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, announced that Mawli had been made leader of Isis in late October, days after a raid by US commandos resulted in the death of the group’s selfstyled ‘‘caliph’’ Abu Bakr albaghdadi.

Mawli, who studied Islamic law at the University of Mosul, became one of the founding members of Isis after meeting

Baghdadi in a Us-run detention facility in 2004, and was nicknamed the ‘‘Professor’’ by fellow jihadists.

Pompeo said that he ‘‘was previously active in al Qaeda in Iraq and was known for torturing Yazidi religious minorities’’, referring to one of Isis’s most barbaric campaigns in 2014.

An estimated 5000 Yazidis were killed and hundreds of women and girls captured, enslaved and raped as militants rampaged across the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in what the United Nations has described as genocide.

Mawli is said to have led the persecutions and later produced Islamic edicts that attempted to justify the massacre.

Although President Donald Trump and others claimed that Isis had been ‘‘100 per cent defeated’’ with the loss of its former territory in 2017, thousands of militant jihadists are now thought to have gone into hiding in remote or ungoverned parts of Iraq and Syria.

Last week Islamic State released a video claiming responsibility for attacks in Kirkuk province that have killed dozens of Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians.

The placing of Mawli on the global terrorist list makes support for him a crime in the US. ‘‘We’ve destroyed the caliphate and we remain committed to Isis’s enduring defeat no matter who they designate as their leader,’’ he said.

Mawli, who was born into an

Iraqi Turkmen family in the town of Tal Afar, is thought to be one of the few non-arabs among the Isis leadership, and also goes by the pseudonym ‘‘Haji Abdullah’’, according to monitoring groups.

Having served in the Iraqi military, he joined al Qaeda in Iraq after the Us-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, the multinational Counter Extremism Project said.

A year later he was captured by US forces and jailed at Camp Bucca, near the Iraq-kuwait border, where he met and formed a bond with Baghdadi and other alqaeda militants who would go on to found Isis.

His whereabouts are unknown but it has been suggested that he followed Baghdadi to Idlib, northern Syria, the last rebel-held province in that country, where the terrorist leader died.

Another possibility is that he is hiding in a remote area of northwest Iraq. – The Times