Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday said that Turkish forces have killed the chief of terrorist group ISIS in Syria.
Erdogan said the ISIS chief was killed in a Turkish strike inside Syria on Saturday. There has been no word on this from ISIS so far.
Turkey controls large swaths of territory in northern Syria following a series of land incursions to drive Kurdish groups away from the Turkish-Syrian border. Previously, Turkey has conducted numerous operations against ISIS and Kurdish groups along the Syrian border, capturing or killing suspected militants.
At least three chiefs of ISIS have so far been killed since 2019 when Abu Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US military operation in Northwestern Syria's Idlib province.
What did Erdogan say?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told TRT Turk television in an interview that the ISIS leader, code-named Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi, was killed in a strike conducted on Saturday.
Erdogan said the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT, had been following him "for a long time".
"We will continue our struggle against terrorist organisations without discriminating against any of them," Erdogan said in the interview.
Who was Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi?
Abu Hussein Al-Qurayshi was named the chief of ISIS in October 2022 after its previous chief was killed.
An ISIS spokesman at the time had called him "one of the veteran warriors and one of the loyal sons of the Islamic State".
Al-Qurayshi took over leadership of ISIS at a time when it had lost control of the territory it once held in Iraq and Syria. However, he had been trying to rise again, with sleeper cells carrying out deadly attacks in both countries.
Killings of ISIS leaders
Most well-known ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was hunted down by US forces in a raid in northwest Syria in October 2019. His successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed in a similar raid in February 2022. He was followed by Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, who according to the US military was killed in mid-October in an operation by Syrian rebels in Syria's southern province of Daraa.
None of the al-Qurayshis are believed to be related. Al-Qurayshi is not their real name but comes from Quraish, the name of the tribe to which Islam's Prophet Muhammad belonged. ISIS claims its leaders hail from this tribe and "al-Qurayshi" serves as part of an ISIS leader's nom de guerre.
The ISIS group broke away from Al-Qaida about a decade ago and ended up controlling large parts of northern and eastern Syria as well as northern and western Iraq. In 2014, the terrorists declared their so-called Caliphate, attracting supporters from around the world.
In the following years, ISIS claimed attacks throughout the world that killed and wounded hundreds of people before coming under attack from different sides. In March 2019, US-backed Syrian fighters captured the last sliver of land the extremists once held in Syria's eastern province of Deir el-Zour that borders Iraq.
(With AP inputs)
