Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the Islamic State group was killed on Thursday, blowing himself up along with members of his family during an overnight raid carried out by US special operations forces in northwestern Syria.
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 IS militants, after years of low-level hit-and-run ambushes, had begun to carry out bolder, higher profile attacks. Last month, its fighters attacked a prison in northeast Syria to free their jailed comrades, leading to a 10 day battle with Kurdish-led forces that left some 500 dead.
His real name was Amir Mohammed Saeed Abdul-Rahman al-Mawla, an Iraqi in his mid-40s, born in 1976 and believed to be an ethnic Turkman from the northern Iraqi town of Tel Afar. He held a degree in Islamic law from the University of Mosul.
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His adoption of the nickname al-Qurayshi when he became IS' “caliph”, suggested that he, like his predecessor, claimed links to the tribe of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
Al-Qurayshi began his militant work shortly after former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was removed from power. A year after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, al-Qurayshi joined al-Qaida in Iraq, run by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Al-Qurayshi was arrested by US troops in Mosul in 2004, where he was held for two years. During his imprisonment, he became al-Baghdadi's top security henchman.
Following al-Zarqawi's death in a US strike in 2006, al-Qurayshi became a senior official with the al-Qaida affiliate's successor group, the Islamic State in Iraq, which under al-Baghdadi transformed into the Islamic State group.
When IS overran much of northern and eastern Syria and northern Iraq and declared its caliphate in 2014, al-Qurayshi became a senior official in the leadership. As the group's caliphate crumbled in the years-long war with a US-led coalition in both Iraq and Syria, he went into hiding.