Islamic State says its spokesman killed in Syria

Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, one of the jihadist group’s longest-serving and most prominent leaders, has been killed in Aleppo in Syria, its Amaq News Agency reported yesterday in a statement distributed by the group’s supporters.

Amaq reported that Adnani was killed “while surveying the operations to repel the military campaigns against Aleppo”.

IS holds territory in the province of Aleppo, but not in the city where rebels are fighting Syrian government forces.

Amaq did not say how Adnani was killed. Islamic State published a eulogy dated August 29th but giving no further details.

Recent advances by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias, and by Syrian rebels backed by Turkey, have made inroads into IS holdings in Aleppo province, cutting them off from the Turkish border and supply lines along it.

Iraq said in January that Adnani had been wounded in an air strike in the western province of Anbar and then moved to the northern city of Mosul, IS’s capital in Iraq.

Adnani is a Syrian from Idlib, southwest of Aleppo, who pledged allegiance to IS’s predecessor al-Qaeda more than a decade ago and was once imprisoned by U.S. forces in Iraq, according to the Washington think-tank Brookings Institution.

Ultra-hardline

He has been the chief propagandist for the ultra-hardline jihadist group since he declared in a June 2014 statement that it was establishing a modern-day caliphate spanning large swathes of territory it had seized in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Adnani has often been the face of the Sunni militant group.

Earlier this year, he called for massive attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He has also called for attacks in Western countries, telling Muslims in France on occasion to attack “the filthy French” in any way they could, including “crush them with your car”.

He has also disparaged Saudi Arabia and its influential clerics for failing to rally behind the rebels that the monarchy supports in Syria like they did decades ago in Afghanistan.

Amaq vowed to gain revenge for the killing. – (Reuters)