Islamic State says leader’s son killed in Syria
BEIRUT (AP) — The Islamic State group says the son of its top leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed fighting Syrian government forces.
The announcement of the death of the al-Baghdadi’s young son appeared on the group’s social media accounts late Tuesday. It included a picture of a young boy carrying a rifle and identified him as Huthaifa alBadri.
The statement, dated this month, said he was an elite fighter, known as an “inghimasi,” who was killed while fighting Syrian and Russian troops at a power station in the central Homs province. It did not specify when he was killed.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group, said the most recent IS operations in the area were in the first two weeks of June.
Al-Baghdadi has been reported killed or wounded on a number of occasions but is widely believed to still be alive. Little is known about al-Baghdadi’s family, but a woman and a child who were said to be his wife and daughter were detained in Lebanon in 2014.
IS has been driven from nearly all the territory it once controlled in Syria and Iraq, though it still maintains a presence in the Syrian desert and remote areas along the Syria-Iraq border.
In other developments, the Observatory said late Tuesday that one of the group’s last pockets in the eastern Syrian province of Deir el-Zour came under intense shelling from the U.S-led coalition. At least 12 militants are believed to have been killed in Hajin, the group said.
Separately, the Observatory said at least 11 displaced Syrians fleeing the fighting in southwestern Syria were killed when they stepped on a land mine. The two-week long offensive in Daraa province has so far displaced up to 330,000 people, including some 60,000 that have fled toward the sealed border with Jordan, the U.N. said Tuesday.