2023-05-01 07:50:20
Turkish forces have killed the alleged leader of the Islamic State (IS) group during an operation in Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday evening, April 30.
President Erdogan said during an interview with Turkish television TRT that the IS leader, known as Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi, was killed in an attack carried out on Saturday, April 29.
Erdogan said the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT, had been following him “for a long time”.
“We will continue our fight once morest terrorist organizations without discriminating once morest any of them,” Erdogan said during the interview.
Turkey has carried out numerous operations once morest IS and Kurdish groups along the Syrian border, capturing or killing suspected militants. Turkey controls large swaths of territory in northern Syria following a series of ground incursions to drive Kurdish groups from the Turkish-Syrian border.
Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi was appointed leader of the militant group following its previous leader was killed in October. An IS spokesman called him “one of the veteran fighters and one of the loyal sons of the Islamic State”.
He took over IS at a time when the extremist group has lost control of the territory it once held in Iraq and Syria. However, the group had tried to reactivate, carrying out several deadly attacks in both countries.
IS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was said to have killed him following being surrounded by US forces in an attack in northwestern Syria in October 2019. His successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed in a similar attack in February 2022. He was succeeded by Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, who, according to the US military, was killed in mid-October in an operation by Syrian rebels in the southern province of Syria , Daraa.
The IS group split from al-Qaeda regarding a decade ago and has since come to control large parts of northern and eastern Syria, as well as northern and western Iraq. In 2014, the extremists declared a so-called caliphate, attracting supporters from around the world.
In the following years, they claimed responsibility for numerous attacks around the world that killed and injured hundreds of people, before being attacked by other countries around the world. In March 2019, US-backed Syrian fighters took control of the last piece of territory once held by the extremists in Syria’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour, which borders Iraq./REL
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