Erdogan says Turkish forces killed Islamic State chief in Syria

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkish forces have killed the leader of the Islamic State group during an operation in SyriaTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sunday night.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Turkish television TRT in an interview that the IS leader, code name Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi, was killed in an attack on Saturday.

Erdogan said that the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT, had been following him “for a long time.”

“We will continue our fight against terrorist organizations without discriminating against any of them,” Erdogan said in the interview.

A member of the Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces’ military police told The Associated Press that MIT clashed with Islamic State militants at a farm in the village of Miska, Aleppo province, on Friday night. As the fighting intensified, Al-Qurayshi, who was hiding in a building on the farm, blew himself up. Investigators searched the cache for evidence and other information.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition war monitor, added that the Turkish drones flew over the area as Turkish-backed Syrian opposition groups closed roads leading to the area where they took place. the clashes after Ankara put them on high alert.

There was no immediate confirmation from the IS group.

Turkey has carried out numerous operations against IS and Kurdish groups along the Syrian border, capturing or killing suspected militants. The country controls large tracts of territory in northern Syria following a series of ground incursions to push Kurdish groups away from the Turkish-Syrian border.

Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi was named the leader of the militant group after his previous boss was assassinated in October, and an Islamic State spokesman called him “one of the veteran warriors and one of the loyal sons of Islamic State.”

He took over leadership of IS at a time when the extremist group has lost control of territory it once held in Iraq and Syria. However, she had been trying to rise again, with sleeper cells carrying out deadly attacks in both countries.

Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was hunted down by US forces in a raid in northwestern Syria in October 2019. His successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed in a similar raid in February He was followed by Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, who the US military says was killed in mid-October in an operation by Syrian rebels in Daraa province in southern Syria.

None of the al-Qurayshis are believed to be related. Al-Qurayshi is not his real name, but comes from Quraish, the name of the tribe to which the Prophet Muhammad of Islam belonged. IS claims that its leaders come from this tribe and “al-Qurayshi” serves as part of an IS leader’s nom de guerre.

The Islamic State group split from al Qaeda about a decade ago and ended up controlling much of northern and eastern Syria, as well as northern and western Iraq. In 2014, the extremists declared their so-called caliphate, drawing supporters from around the world.

In the years that followed, they claimed responsibility for attacks around the world that killed and injured hundreds of people before being attacked from different sides. In March 2019, US-backed Syrian fighters captured the last piece of land the extremists ever held in the eastern Syrian province of Deir el-Zour, which borders Iraq. ——

Sewell reported from Beirut.