His name was unknown to the general public. He will certainly have a successor, but his passing is nonetheless a success for the White House. The leader of the jihadist organization Islamic State (IS), nicknamed Abu Ibrahim Al-Hachimi Al-Qourachi, was killed in an American military operation, carried out Thursday, February 3, on the ground, in the north-west of the Syria.
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s successor, killed in a similar attack in October 2019, reportedly blew himself up with an explosive charge to avoid capture. He had been living for months in a multi-storey house, with his family, in Atmé, in the province of Idlib, an area controlled by Hayat Tahrir Al-Cham (HTC), the former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. . A premium of 10 million dollars (8.7 million euros) had been offered by the United States for his neutralization.
“This operation is a testament to America’s reach and capabilities to eliminate terrorist threats, no matter where in the world they try to hide”, said Joe Biden, during a speech delivered in the morning at the White House. In April 2021, the director of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, had expressed concern that the coming military withdrawal from Afghanistan would lead to a drop in intelligence gathering on Al-Qaeda. and IS. The Atmé operation also serves to confirm the United States’ continued commitment to the fight against terrorism in the Middle East.
“The Driving Force in the Genocide of the Yazidis”
According to US President Al-Qurachi “was the driving force in the genocide of the Yazidi people in northwestern Iraq in 2014,” an allusion to the massacres perpetrated by the IS against this Iraqi religious minority. Joe Biden also attributed to this “terrible terrorist leader” a key role in the spectacular but inconclusive attack recently carried out by IS against the Ghwayran prison, under the control of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Hassaké, in northeastern Syria . The assault, which lasted more than a week and resulted in the death of 373 people, including 268 assailants, is the largest operation carried out by the jihadist organization since the crushing of its self-proclaimed caliphate in 2019. under the blows of the SDS and the international anti-IS coalition.
According to the Syrian White Helmets organization, 13 civilians were killed during the operation on Thursday. On the American side, full responsibility for these losses – estimated at a lower number of people, without further details – is attributed to the attitude of the leader of the IS and one of his lieutenants. Living on the third floor of the building, Al-Qurachi never went out, except to occasionally go to the roof. He used messengers to communicate with his network of correspondents. “In an ultimate and desperate gesture of cowardice”, according to the expression of Joe Biden, he would have activated a bomb at the beginning of the operation, thus causing his own death as well as that of his family. One of his lieutenants, on the second floor, would have tried to resist, before being killed, with his relatives.
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