US President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that the leader of the terrorist group Islamic State, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, died during an overnight raid by US special forces in Syria's Idlib province that also left several civilians dead.
Biden said al-Qurashi detonated an explosive vest he was wearing as US forces approached, killing himself and his family, "in a final act of desperate cowardice."
The US had "removed a major terrorist threat to the world," Biden said in a White House speech, adding that no soldiers had been harmed during the operation.
The Defence Department said al-Qurashi's body was positively identified at the scene through fingerprints and then later with the help of DNA samples.
Little is publicly known about al-Qurashi, who has led the extremist group since the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who also killed himself in 2019 as US special forces were closing in on him.
According to Washington, al-Qurashi was one of the main perpetrators of the genocide of the Yezidi religious minority in Iraq in 2014 and the enslavement of thousands of Yezidi girls as weapons of war.
A senior administration official described al-Qurashi as controlling a global network of Islamic State offshoots, from Africa to Afghanistan, and said he was directly responsible for operations in Iraq and Syria, where he had been trying to mount to a resurgence.
Among his litany of crimes, Biden said al-Qurashi was responsible for the January 20th attack by IS militants at a prison run by the US-backed Kurdish forces in the city of al-Hassakeh in north-eastern Syria, in a brazen operation aimed at freeing imprisoned IS members.
At least 13 people, including four children, were killed in the hours-long US operation on Thursday that resulted in al-Qurashi's death, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, reported.
The counterterrorism raid was mounted by air and land in the Atmeh area of Idlib province, not far from the Turkish border, under the cover of darkness.
US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin's spokesperson acknowledged there were civilian casualties and that there would be an examination as to whether US forces had harmed them due to their actions.
But so far the Biden administration is saying that the civilian deaths were due to the resistance put up by al-Qurashi and his decision to detonate his bomb while in a house filled with people.
The resulting explosion was so violent it threw bodies far from the building, the administration official said. Al-Qurashi's wife and two children were among the dead.
The official said US forces repeatedly warned residents using loudspeakers to retreat to safety before descending on al-Qurashi. Some of them quickly ran for safety, he said.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris watched the operation at the White House via a live-feed.
The operation was said to have been in the works for months.
Residents in the area reported hearing heavy gunfire and explosions in the early hours. One local told a dpa photographer on the scene that the fighting lasted around three hours.
The locals also claimed they had never considered there to have been anything suspicious about the house.
Al-Qurashi was discovered just a few kilometres from where al-Baghdadi was killed in October 2019.
IS took control of large swathes of neighbouring Iraq in mid-2014. Shortly afterwards, the hardline jihadists proclaimed an Islamic caliphate that also included regions in Syria.
The radical militia has been declared militarily defeated in both countries, but it remains active and has repeatedly unleashed attacks.
Source: DPA
