The militant Islamic State, or Dai’sh, said on Wednesday that its leader, Abu Hassan al-Hashemi al-Qurashi, had been killed in combat and announced his replacement.
A spokesman for the group said Hashemi, an Iraqi, was killed “in a fight with the enemies of God,” without specifying the date or circumstances of his death.
Speaking in an audio message, the spokesperson identified the group’s new leader as Abu Hussain Al Hussaini Al Qurashi.
After a meteoric surge in Iraq and Syria in 2014 that saw it conquer vast swathes of territory, Dai’sh saw its self-styled “caliphate” collapse in a wave of aggression.
The extremist group’s austerity and reign of terror were marked by beheadings and bullets.
It was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, but sleeper cells still carry out attacks in both countries.
The group or its affiliates have also claimed attacks this year in Afghanistan, Iran and Israel, among other places.
The spokesman did not provide details about the new leader, but said he was an “experienced” militant and called on all groups loyal to IS to pledge allegiance to its fourth leader.
Former Dai’sh leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi was killed in a US strike in the northern Syrian province of Idlib in February this year.
His predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was also killed in Idlib in October 2019.
Hassan Hassan, who has written a book on Dai’sh, said an “unprecedented” but possible scenario is that Hashemi was killed “accidentally” during a raid or battle, without anyone actually killing him. .
But “Jihadist groups have a long history of claiming to have killed leaders/commanders, only to have intelligence/security agencies back them up,” he added on Twitter.
In October of this year, US forces killed a “senior” Dai’sh member in a pre-dawn operation in northeastern Syria, the US military’s Central Command said at the time.
The US is leading a military coalition fighting Dai’sh in Syria.
CENTCOM said the raid targeted “Raqan Wahid al-Shammari, an Dai’sh operative known to facilitate the smuggling of weapons and fighters.”
It said two other senior Dai’sh members were killed in a subsequent airstrike.
Turkai said in September that security forces had arrested a “senior executive” of Dai’sh known as Abu Zeid, whose real name was Bashar al-Khattab Ghazal al-Samidai.
Another possible scenario was that Turkey had actually captured the Dai’sh leader, but the group had now announced his death to save face, analyst Hasan said.
Thousands of suspected militants and their relatives are still being held in camps in Syria and prisons in Iraq.
In January, Dai’sh launched a major attack on fellow militants at a prison in northeastern Syria in an attempt to break out a prison, triggering a week of deadly clashes.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said hundreds of Dai’sh prisoners, including senior leaders, had escaped, some of them into neighboring Turkey or Turkish-held territory in northern Syria.
The Pentagon warned on Tuesday that a threatened Turkish ground operation in Syria would “severely jeopardize” the gains made in the war against Dai’sh.
