BEIRUT (AP), — A U.S. air raid in northwest Syria killed the leader of Islamic State. He was a former insider and top ideologue. It is believed that he played a crucial role in the atrocities of the group’s Yazidi religious minority, which saw the enslavement tens of thousands of Yazidi women in Iraq.
He was known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. He kept his identity a mystery for more than two years.
He was hiding and led the group’s remaining members as they regrouped after the fall of their caliphate. Then, he shifted underground to wage insurgency against the government in Iraq and Syria.
In Syria’s rebel-held Idlib Province, he was killed in a house he rented, only 24 km (15 miles) away from the safehouse in which his predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was captured in an identical raid in October 2019.
After years of low-level ambushes and hit-and-run attacks, IS militants began to strike harder, more publicized attacks. The IS militants attacked a prison in northeast Syria last month to release their comrades. This led to a 10-day battle with Kurdish-led forces, which left around 500 people dead.
Al-Qurayshi’s passing may affect the group’s momentum, but it is unlikely to have a negative impact on its operations long-term.
Aaron Y. Zelin (a senior fellow at Washington Institute for Near East Policy) said that the organization is not focused on charismatic leadership but rather ideas. “I believe the IS machine will continue regardless of who the new leader is.”
Al-Qurayshi was actually Amir Mohammed Saeed Abdul-Rahman al-Mawla. Al-Qurayshi was an Iraqi man in his 40s who was born in 1976. He is believed to have been an ethnic Turkman from Tel Afar, a northern Iraqi city. He received a degree from the University of Mosul in Islamic law.
After being promoted to IS leader after al-Baghdadi’s passing, he took the al-Qurayshi nom de guerre — suggesting that he, as his predecessor, had claimed connections to the tribe of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.
Al-Qurayshi, like his predecessor, spent his final days in Idlib province. This area is held by insurgents hostile to IS, a distance from the main theatres of war in eastern Syria, Iraq, and other parts of Syria. It was once home to large swathes of territory under a self-declared ‘caliphate.
He was in Atmeh, a three-story home near the border to Turkey. According to U.S. officials, he also blew himself up during the raid that occurred early Thursday morning. This led to the deaths of a number children and women. First responders on the scene reported that 13 people were killed, including six children and four women, during the raid during which U.S forces battled gunmen inside and around the house.
The last stronghold of the rebels in Syria is Idlib. It houses 3 million people. Many have been displaced by civil war. This makes it easy for strangers and others to blend in. Al-Qurayshi chose to surround the house with olive trees to keep it as far from any eyes as possible.
According to journalists on the scene, neighbors claimed that the man who lived at the top of the building with his family was Abu Ahmad. He is a Syrian refugee who had been forced from Aleppo province by war. Arabiya TV suggested that three of the victims might have been Al-Qurayshi’s women.
Al-Qurayshi, who has been in command of IS since then, is on the U.S. wanted list along with other regional governments that are fighting extremists. Al-Qurayshi did not make any public appearances and seldom released audio recordings. It is unknown how much he influenced the operations of the group and whether he had any successors.
Al-Qurayshi started his militant work after Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq, was ousted from power. Al-Qurayshi joined al-Qaida, a terrorist group in Iraq, one year after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Al-Zarqawi died in a U.S. attack in 2006. In 2006, al-Qurayshi was promoted to a top official in the successor group to al-Qaida, the Islamic State of Iraq. According to a West Point report, he quickly became the top Islamic Sharia law official for the group in Mosul. Al-Qurayshi was also known as Abu Omar al-Turkmani and Abdullah Qaradash.
In 2008, he was captured by U.S. soldiers in Mosul and held for two years.
Al-Baghdadi transformed the group into the Islamic State group and broke with al-Qaida. ISIS declared its caliphate in 2014 after it seized large swathes of northern and eastern Syria, and northern Iraq.
Al-Qurayshi was a member the Delegated Committee. He served as the group’s senior judge and Sharia official, in Iraq. According to the Center for International Justice and Accountability (Civil and Criminal Investigations), he was investigated as part of an effort to compile cases against IS leaders on war crimes and crimes versus humanity.
He was responsible for the massacre of Yazidi boys and men, and the enslavement and deportation of thousands of Yazidi girls kidnapped by IS after it overran northwest Iraq’s heartland. CIJA stated that he was responsible for the forced conversions of children and oversaw the distribution to IS members of enslaved children and women.
Al-Qurayshi had “immensive power to persecute, punish and exterminate IS’s enemies back in 2014.” He was not only one of the main architects of the Islamic State slave market in Yazidi children and women, but he also enslaved, raped, and raped captive females,” Nerma Jerlacic, CIJA deputy director.
Joe Biden stated that al-Qurayshi was directly liable for the prison strike in Syria last month and the mass killings in Iraq of the Yazidi population.
Biden stated Thursday that he was responsible for the Yazidi genocide. “We all recall the heart-wrenching stories, mass massacres that decimated entire villages, thousands upon thousands of young girls sold into slavery and rape as a weapon in war,” Biden said Thursday.
