ISIL’s Defence Chief Omar al-Shishani Killed In Air Strike

Baghdad: Omar al-Shishani, a top commander of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), has been killed in Iraq, a website affiliated with the armed group said.

Citing a “military source”, ISIL’s website on Wednesday said that Shishani was killed “in the town of Sharqat as he took part in repelling the military campaign on the city of Mosul”. Amaq, the ISIL-linked website, did not specify when Shishani was killed, but the loss of the commander is a significant blow to the group, which has suffered a string of setbacks in Iraq this year.

Reportedly, Mosul is the last ISIL-held city in Iraq. The Pentagon announced in March that US forces had killed Shishani, saying his death would likely hamper ISIL's operations in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said Shishani made a name for himself during the capture of Menagh Air Base from Syrian government forces in 2013.US-backed rebels teamed up with Shishani’s militia, which was mostly foreign fighters, and used suicide bombers to finally capture the air base after a two-year-long siege in northern Syria. “He then joined ISIS and rose to the top. He was a big personality. Troops liked him,” Landis told Al Jazeera.

“It’s been reported a number of times that he’s been killed, most recently in March. The United Stated claimed that it had killed him in a bombing raid. Then they denied it. Some people said that he was brain dead in a hospital. So we don’t know yet. There is a lot of fog around this — whether this is related to the bombing in March or this is something new,” he said. “Anyway, it will be a real detriment to ISIS,” he further added.

Shishani, whose real name was Tarkhan Batirashvili, was a fierce, battle-hardened fighter with roots in Georgia. 

Shishani, whose nom de guerre means “Omar the Chechen”, was one of the ISIL leaders most wanted by Washington, which had put a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head. His exact rank was unclear, but US officials had branded him as "equivalent of the secretary of defence" for ISIL. Shishani came from the former Soviet state of Georgia's Pankisi Gorge region, which is populated mainly by ethnic Chechens.