The kill list: Islamic State leaders taken off battlefield
New intelligence helps military increase momentum of targeted strikes
An armed U.S. drone launched an airstrike Monday targeting Abu Muhammad Adnani, a charismatic Islamic State spokesman and leader, while he traveled in a vehicle on the outskirts of Al Bab in northwestern Syria, U.S. military officials said.
The 39-year-old Syrian militant, who lured thousands of recruits from around the world to become fighters for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, became the latest victim of the U.S. military’s secretive targeted killing campaign to eradicate militant leaders.
The campaign, which operates separately from the wider U.S.-led military effort against Islamic State, has killed more than 120 leaders, recruiters and financiers known as “high-value targets” since late last year, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.
The targeted airstrikes have picked up momentum because of fresh intelligence collected by special operations commandos conducting night raids, from confessions by militants captured by coalition forces and via electronic communications intercepted by U.S. operatives.
The Pentagon believes the strikes are slowly dismantling the militants’ leadership networks, sowing paranoia among their ranks, and helping roll back territory governed by the group.
Still top U.S. military commanders and counter-terrorism analysts recognize that assassinating militant leaders one by one — even the group’s leader, Abu Bakr Baghdadi — is unlikely to deal a fatal blow to Islamic State. The fight is expected to only increase in violence as the U.S.-led coalition begins to try to dislodge the militants from their strongholds in densely populated cities in Iraq and Syria.
The campaign, run by the U.S. military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, N.C., is an outcropping of the “kill/capture operations” that had been developed against insurgents in the Iraq war and expanded in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration has built an extensive counter-terrorism apparatus that harnesses armed drones, human intelligence and electronic surveillance to “find, fix and finish” top militants in remote corners of the globe.
Here is a look at prominent Islamic State leaders who have been killed: