BAGHDAD — A top Daesh commander and feared Chechen terrorist Omar Al-Shishani has died of wounds suffered in a US air strike in Syria last week, a senior Iraqi intelligence official and the head of a Syrian activist group said Tuesday.
The news of his death was confirmed by spokesman for the US-led coalition battling the Daesh group US Army Col. Steve Warren.
Al-Shishani died on Monday outside the Daesh group’s main stronghold of Raqqa in Syria.
Warren said on Tuesday that the coalition is able to "assess that he is dead." Warren said they "got the word Monday morning."
The read-bearded ethnic Chechen was one of the most prominent Daesh commanders, serving as the group’s military commander for the territory it controls in Syria. He may have also become the group’s overall military chief, a post that has been vacant after the Iraqi militant who once held it — known as Abu Abdul-Rahman Al-Bilawi Al-Anbari — was killed in the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014.
According to Rami Abdurrahman, of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which tracks the Syrian conflict through a network of activists on the ground, after Al-Shishani was wounded, Daesh “brought a number of doctors to treat him, but they were not able to.”
Abdurrahman said Al-Shishani died in a hospital in the eastern suburbs of Raqqa. The Iraqi intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the Daesh commander was buried in Deir El-Zour on Tuesday.
A US air strike targeted Al-Shishani on March 4 near the town of Al-Shaddadi in Syria, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters in a statement last week.
Al-Shishani “had been sent to Al-Shaddadi to bolster ISIL (Daesh) fighters following a series of strategic defeats,” Cook said in the statement.
Warren told reporters on Friday that the airstrike that targeted al-Shishani was part of a series of stepped-up coalition strikes targeting Daesh leadership.
Al-Shishani was in the area of Al-Shaddadi “along with about a dozen other fighters who were in one spot ... and we struck it,” Warren said at the time.
