Al Baghdadi’s son killed in suicide operation
“May Allah Accept him”, reads a tribute on a poster announcing the identity of the latest high-profile ISIS member to die.
Sporting a pakol – the flattened cap more commonly associated with the tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan than the once-cosmopolitan cities of west Syria, a baby-faced militant with a steely gaze and an automatic rifle poses square to the camera.
But this is no rank-and-file fighter. This is the son of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, killed in battle in Syria, the poster claims.
Distributed via messanging app Telegram on Tuesday, the poster says Huzaifa Al Badri was killed in an operation in Syria’s Homs province in an attack on a power plant held by the Syrian government with the support of Russian forces.
It claims Al Badri was killed fighting as an inghamasi, the name given to an operation wherein an insurgent fights until they can no longer fight – be that to the death, or to some miraculous victory. A security source told The
National that the use of Al Badri in such an attack represents an effort to mend divisions that have surfaced in the group since its loss of Mosul and Raqqa last year.
“It’s most likely a symbolic gesture to curb infighting from those who demand to see Al Baghdadi still alive and committed to the cause.”
Iraqi security analyst Hisham Al Hashemi said on Twitter that Al Badri had been last seen in September last year in the town of Hajin, east Syria, with his father’s bodyguard Abdullatif Al Jabouri.
Hajin is one of the few areas still openly held by ISIS, one of the last places where the black flag flies openly. Last month, about 45 members of the terrorist group were killed there in an air strike after gathering in the town for a meeting.
Security officials suspect there are up to 800 of the extremists in the largely abandoned town – probably outnumbering the remnants of the local population – an indicator of the group’s failed governance project. Hajin is no more a state than it is a backwater hideout. But while the group has been rolled back and Al Baghdadi has seemingly vanished, there is evidence that the extremist ISIS is attempting to infiltrate other parts of Syria.
A western security source told The National: “There are growing numbers of ISIS still entering Idlib and Suwayda in southern Syria.
“Suwayda was recently featured on the front of Al Naba
[the group’s newsletter], I can’t recall it coming to the fore like this.”
Little is known about the personal life of Al Baghdadi or about those close to him, but Mr Al Hashemi said that Al Badri was born in 2000 in the Iraqi city of Samarra, Saladin Governorate, to Asma Fawzi Al Qubaisi, the first of the leader’s three wives.
The site of Al Badri’s death, in Syria’s government-controlled west, might serve as something of a surprise to those following the efforts to hunt down Al Baghdadi.
Much of the hunt for the socalled caliph, who has a US$25 million (Dh91.8m) bounty on his head, has focused on the arid desert straddling the Syrian-Iraqi border.
The long-standing assumption being that as the group’s territory receded, the deeper into it the “caliph” retreated.
Intelligence officials have confirmed Al Baghdadi was seriously injured in a coalition air strike near the town of Shirqaat in Iraq in early 2015. Earlier this year, The Guardian reported that in 2016, as the battle for Mosul began, a slip-up in which he spoke on an unsecured radio line for 45 seconds led to him being traced to a village between Mosul and Tel Afar.
More recently there was a confirmed sighting on the Syrian side of the border in the town of Al Bukamal during Ramadan last year.
His last public statement came in September last year, in an audio recording released online.
To this day, the only video footage of him remains that of him ascending the pulpit in Mosul’s Al Nuri mosque, the video in which he bestowed on himself the title of caliph. Days later, the “Islamic state of Iraq and Syria” was officially announced.
Much of the group’s senior leadership has gone to ground or been killed on the battlefield. But there has been limited success in hunting them down.
In March, five senior ISIS officials were lured across the border from Syria into Iraq in a daring operation by Iraqi and US intelligence services, they now await trial in Baghdad.
Dead or alive, Al Baghdadi continues to evade capture. Perhaps his son’s death suggests the world has been looking in the wrong place.
Al Badri was last seen in September last year in Hajin, east Syria, with his father’s bodyguard Abdullatif Al Jabouri HISHAM AL HASHEMI Iraqi security analyst