U.S. airstrike kills senior Daesh commander
Omar al-Shishani died Monday of injuries from a March 4 attack in Syria
BAGHDAD— Omar al-Shishani, a top Daesh (otherwise known as ISIS or ISIL) commander who was a magnet for fighters from the former Soviet Union, has died of injuries suffered in a March 4 U.S. airstrike in Syria, a senior Iraqi intelligence official and the head of a Syrian activist group said Tuesday.
Al-Shishani, who was injured in a U.S. airstrike earlier this month, died on Monday evening outside Daesh’s main stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, the two told The Associated Press. A U.S. military spokesman confirmed the reports.
The Daesh-affiliated Aamaq news agency cited an unnamed source as denying that al-Shishani was injured or killed, without providing any evidence that he was still alive.
The red-bearded ethnic Chechen, who was in his 30s, was one of the most prominent Daesh commanders, appearing in several online videos leading fighters into battle. He served as the top commander in Syria before being appointed to lead three elite units that carried out special missions in Syria and Iraq, according to Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar who follows the group.
Al-Shishani, whose real name was Tarkhan Batirashvili, was an ethnic Chechen from Georgia, a former Soviet nation in the Caucasus. He hailed from the Pankisi Valley, a centre of the Chechen community and a former militant stronghold.
He did military service in the Geor- gian army but was discharged after an unspecified illness, a former neighbour told The Associated Press in 2014. Georgian police later arrested him for illegal possession of arms, the neighbour said. Upon his release in 2010, Batirashvili left for Turkey.
He first surfaced in Syria in 2013 with his nom de guerre, which means “Omar the Chechen” in Arabic, leading an Al Qaeda-inspired group called “The Army of Emigrants and Partisans,” which included a large number of fighters from the former Soviet Union. About1,500 battle-hardened fighters from the Caucasus joined Daesh because of al-Shishani, al-Hashimi said.
He first showed his battlefield prowess in 2013, when his fighters proved pivotal in taking the Syrian military’s Managh airbase in the north. Rebels had been trying for months to take the base, but it fell soon after al-Shishani joined the battle, said an activist from the region, Abu al-Hassan Maraee.
In a video released in the summer of 2014, after Daesh swept across northern and western Iraq and declared an Islamic caliphate, al-Shishani stood next to the group’s spokesman and other fighters as they declared the elimination of the border between Iraq and Syria.