Isis leader al-Qurayshi killed in US raid in Syria was a murky figure
- Isis leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi blew up himself and his family as US forces attacked Syria hideout on Thursday
- He became Isis’ self-styled caliph after his predecessor, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a raid in late 2019
He met his end in the same rebel-held Idlib province where his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was hunted down by the Americans more than two years ago, some distance from the main theatres in eastern Syria and Iraq where the group once held vast swathes of territory in a self-declared “caliphate”.
A veteran militant since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he took the name Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi when he took over command of IS after al-Baghdadi was killed in the October 2019 raid. It was up to him to lead the group’s remnants as they regrouped following the downfall of their caliphate and shifted underground to wage an insurgency in Iraq and Syria.
His death comes as Isis militants, after years of low-level hit-and-run ambushes, had begun to carry out bolder, higher profile attacks. Last month, Isis attacked a prison in northeast Syria to free jailed comrades, leading to a 10-day battle with Kurdish-led forces that left some 500 dead.
Biden also said al-Qurayshi was directly responsible for the prison strike, as well as the mass killings of the Yazidi people in Iraq in 2014.
