DUSHANBE, March 15, 2016, Asia-Plus — A senior commander of so-called Islamic State (IS) militant group is dead, the Pentagon has confirmed.
U.S. defense officials said Omar Shishani died from injuries sustained in a recent US air strike in north-eastern Syria.
The strike took place on March 4 near the north-eastern town of Shaddadi, where Shishani had reportedly been sent to bolster local IS forces.
The
BBC
reports that a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the latest assessment was that “Shishani is dead.”
According to
CNN
, he was killed along with 12 additional IS fighters in a wave of strikes by drones and manned aircraft.
The strike was quickly called in when there was sudden intelligence that Shishani was a “shura,” or meeting with other IS officials. The aircraft and drones had already been patrolling in the skies.
CNN
reports that the Pentagon has offered different locations for precisely where the strike happened, in one instance saying it was near al-Shaddadi but in a press release indicating it happened near al-Hawl several kilometers away.
On March 13, monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the IS leader had been “clinically dead” for several days.
Last week, the observatory”s director, Rami Abdul Rahman, quoted sources saying that Shishani had been badly wounded and had been taken to a hospital in Raqqa province where he was treated by “a jihadist doctor of European origin”.
US officials have said they believe Shishani was sent to the Shaddadi area to reinforce IS militants following a series of military defeats.
Shaddadi was captured last month by the Syrian Arab Coalition, an alliance of Arab rebel groups which joined forces with the Kurdish YPG militia to battle IS.
Shishani has had a reputation as one of ISIS” most capable commanders. There has been a $5 million reward on his head from the U.S. State Department. Also known as Omar “the Chechen” al-Shishani, he was born Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili and once served in an elite Georgian military unit. He reportedly joined IS militant group in 2013 and later was in charge of a prison near Raqqa where the terror organization might have held foreign hostages.
Shishani instructed the group to transport vehicles and weapons to Syria from Iraq in June 2014, and he was eventually named IS”s northern commander by leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, overseeing military operations in northern Syria.
