Strike by US forces may have killed IS leader in Syria
Baghdadi led al-Qaeda offshoot since 2010
The leader of Islamic State is believed to have been killed in a US military operation in Syria.
This was according to sources speaking on Sunday, as US President Donald Trump prepared to make a “major statement”.
A US official said IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been targeted in the overnight raid but was unable to say whether the operation was successful.
A commander of one of the militant factions in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib said Baghdadi was believed to have been killed in a raid in the village of Brisha near the Turkish border.
Two Iraqi security sources and two Iranian officials said they had received confirmation from inside Syria that Baghdadi had been killed.
White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley announced that Trump would make a “major statement” on Sunday.
The president gave an indication that something was afoot on Saturday when he tweeted, “Something very big has just happened!”
Trump has faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for his US troop withdrawal from northeastern Syria, which permitted Turkey to attack America’s Kurdish allies. For days, US officials feared that IS would seek to capitalise on the upheaval in Syria. But they also saw a potential opportunity, in which IS leaders might break from more secretive routines to communicate with operatives, potentially creating a chance for the US and its allies to detect them.
Baghdadi was long thought to be hiding somewhere along the Iraq-Syria border. He has led the group since 2010, when it was still an underground offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
At the height of its power IS ruled over millions of people in territory running from northern Syria through towns and villages along the Tigris and Euphrates valleys to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
But the fall in 2017 of Mosul and Raqqa, its strongholds in Iraq and Syria respectively, stripped Baghdadi, an Iraqi, of the trappings of a caliph and turned him into a fugitive thought to be moving along the desert border between Iraq and Syria.
US air strikes killed most of his top lieutenants, and before IS published a video message of Baghdadi in April there had been conflicting reports over whether he was alive.
Despite losing its last significant territory, IS is believed to have sleeper cells around the world, and some fighters operate from the shadows in Syria’s desert and Iraq’s cities.