L’The US military “eliminated from the battlefield” the leader of the Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Ibrahim al-Hachimi al-Qurachi, during an operation conducted in northern Syria overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, a announced President Joe Biden. All American soldiers are safe and sound, said the president, who announced that he would address the American people later in the morning. Abu Ibrahim al-Hachimi al-Qurachi died in an explosion he caused, a senior White House official said.
“At the start of the operation, the terrorist target detonated a bomb which killed her and her own family members, including women and children,” he said, noting that the he evaluation of the precise results of the operation was still in progress.
13 dead in the operation
US special forces were helicoptered before dawn on Thursday to a region in northwestern Syria, a rare operation of its kind that left 13 dead, including women and children, according to an NGO.
This is the largest operation by US forces in Syria since the death in a similar raid in October 2019 of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, former leader of IS. Nicknamed “the professor” or the “destroyer”, Amir Mohammed Said Abdel Rahman al-Mawla, a jihadist with multiple aliases presented by the jihadist group as “the emir” Abu Ibrahim al-Hachimi al-Qourachi, notably presided over the massacre of the Kurdish-speaking minority of the Yazidis.