THU 28 - 3 - 2024
 
Date: Nov 10, 2014
Source: The Daily Star
Fate of ISIS leader unclear after airstrike
BAGHDAD: Confusion swirled over the fate of the leader of ISIS Sunday after an airstrike reportedly targeted leaders of the extremist group on the Iraq-Syria border.
 
Iraqi officials said that an airstrike wounded Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi while Pentagon officials said they had no immediate information on such a strike or Baghdadi being wounded.
 
Iraq’s Defense and Interior Ministries issued statements saying Baghdadi had been wounded, without elaborating.
 
Separately, U.S. President Barack Obama said Sunday that deploying additional troops to Iraq signaled a “new phase” in the fight against ISIS. After earlier unveiling plans to send up to 1,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq to advise and train the country’s forces, Obama told CBS News that the U.S.-led effort to defeat ISIS was moving to a new stage.
 
“Phase one was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible – and we now have done that,” Obama told CBS News.
 
“Rather than just try to halt [ISIS’] momentum, we’re now in a position to start going on some offense,” the president added, stressing the need for Iraqi ground troops to start pushing back ISIS fighters.
 
“We will provide them close air support once they are prepared to start going on the offence against [ISIS],” Obama said.
 
“But what we will not be doing is having our troops do the fighting.”
 
The additional troops announced by Obama would roughly double the number of American military personnel in the country to about 3,100, marking a significant return of U.S. forces to Iraq by a president who has hailed his role in their 2011 departure.
 
In Baghdad, an Interior Ministry intelligence official told the Associated Press that the ISIS leader was hit during a meeting Saturday with militants in the town of Al-Qaim in Iraq’s western Anbar province. The official, citing informants within the militant group, said the strike wounded Baghdadi. A senior Iraqi military official also said he learned in operational meetings that Baghdadi had been wounded.
 
Neither knew the extent of Baghdadi’s apparent injuries. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential material. State television later also reported that Baghdadi had been wounded.
 
One Twitter account claimed Baghdadi had been wounded but others that support ISIS said the report was untrue.
 
Baghdadi, an ambitious Iraqi militant believed to be in his early 40s, has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Since taking the reins of the group in 2010, he has transformed it from a local branch of Al-Qaeda into an independent transnational military force, positioning himself as perhaps the pre-eminent figure in the global jihadist community.
 
The reclusive leader is purported to have made only one public appearance, delivering a sermon at a mosque in Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, as seen in a video posted online in June.
 
Also in northern Iraq, government forces reached the center of the city of Baiji in an effort to break a siege by ISIS militants of the country’s biggest refinery, triggering fierce clashes, according to an army colonel and a witness.ISIS insurgents seized Baiji in June during a lightning advance they led through northern Iraq. Since then, they have surrounded the refinery and halted its production while a detachment of government troops has held out for months under siege inside it.
 
The colonel said Iraqi troops entered Baiji, a city of about 200,000 people, from the south and west and took over the Al-Tamim neighborhood and city center.
 
ISIS had placed bombs along roads in Baiji and deployed snipers to keep government forces from advancing, tactics used in other cities held by the ultra-hard-line Sunni group, which controls swaths of both Iraq and Syria.
 
“There are IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and snipers that are slowing down the advance, but the presence of the air force has facilitated the process of dismantling the IEDs in order to push forward,” the colonel said.
 
“The areas taken so far are 6 kilometers away from Baiji’s refinery,” he added. He said 12 militants had been killed.
 
Baiji resident Sultan al-Janabi told Reuters by telephone from his house that clashes had been raging since the advance, the first time security forces reached the city center since launching a new encirclement strategy at the end of last month. “Violent confrontations are taking place in Baiji right now. I’ve been hearing continuous fire and loud bangs,” Janabi said.
 
ISIS has also dispatched suicide bombers to keep security forces on the defensive. A suicide bomber Friday night rammed a truck packed with explosives into a Humvee transporting senior police commander Gen. Faisal Malik, one of the supervisors of the campaign against ISIS militants surrounding the facility. The general and two policemen were killed.
 
The truck used in the attack was armored, the army colonel and a provincial police command center said, suggesting ISIS had seized it from defeated Iraqi troops. Tanks and anti-aircraft weapons have also been taken.
 
The army colonel estimated that Iraqi forces had taken about 40 percent of the city center. That could not be independently confirmed.
 
If the siege of the Baiji refinery is broken, Iraq’s government is likely to describe it as a major victory over ISIS. Iraqi media portrayed the slain general, Malik, as a hero.



 
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