Top Islamic State leader dead, Iraqi official, monitor say

PanARMENIAN.Net - A top Islamic State commander and feared Chechen jihadi fighter Omar al-Shishani has died of wounds suffered in a U.S. airstrike in Syria last week, a senior Iraqi intelligence official and the head of a Syrian activist group said Tuesday, March 15, according to the Associated Press.

Al-Shishani died on Monday outside the Islamic State group's main stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, the two told the Associated Press.

The read-bearded ethnic Chechen was one of the most prominent IS 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, IS "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 IS commander was buried in Deir el-Zour on Tuesday, AP says.

A U.S. airstrike 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.