AIN AL BAYDAH, Syria: The Daesh group’s spokesman was killed Sunday in northern Syria, a top Kurdish official said, hours after the extremists’ leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was announced dead.
The official with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said Daesh spokesman Abu Hassan Al-Muhajir had been killed, after SDF chief Mazloum Abdi said he had been “targeted” in a fresh raid.
“Al-MuHajjir, the right-hand of Baghdadi and the spokesman for IS, was targeted in the village of Ain Al-Baydah near Jarablus, in a coordinated operation between SDF intelligence and the US army,” Abdi said on Twitter.
An AFP correspondent in Ain Al-Baydah, which is controlled by Turkey-backed Syrian rebels, said two vehicles where hit by airstrikes: a small pick-up truck and a larger truck carrying a small metal container.
He saw two corpses lying outside the first vehicle while a third charred body was in the metal container.
He could not identify who was behind the strikes or if they were carried out by warplanes or a drone.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the death of Al-Muhajir, saying he was among five IS members who were killed in a US-led operation backed by the SDF.
In a later post on Twitter, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said: “We believe Daesh spox.Al-Muhajir was in Jarablus to facilitate Baghdadi’s entry to Euphrates Shield area,” referring to a zone in northern Syria controlled by Turkey’s Syria proxies.
“The two US-led operations have effectively disabled top Daesh leadership who were hiding” in northwest Syria.
“More still remain hiding in the same area,” Bali said.
Earlier on Sunday, Trump said Al-Baghdadi was killed, dying “like a dog,” in a daring, nighttime raid by US special forces deep in northwest Syria.
Trump said that US forces killed a “large number” of Daesh militants during the raid, which culminated in Al-Baghdadi cornered in a tunnel, where he detonated a suicide vest.
The operation to kill Al-Baghdadi took place near a small village in northwestern Syria called Barisha, more than a 100 kilometers west of Ain Al-Baydah.
The Daesh “caliphate” was eradicated in March, nearly five years after it was proclaimed by Al-Baghdadi, largely reducing the militants to scattered sleeper cells.
At the time, the Daesh spokesman came out of months of silence to spur on his troops.
He had not delivered a speech since March.