Iraq air strikes leave two IS senior leaders dead

Two senior military leaders of the Islamic State militant group were reportedly killed by a US-led coalition air strike near the Iraqi city of Mosul.

“Coalition forces conducted an airstrike against two Isil senior military commanders on 25 June near Mosul, Iraq, resulting in their deaths,” Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook said on Friday, using a different acronym for IS. “The precision strike killed Basim Muhammad Ahmad Sultan al-Bajari, Isil’s deputy minister of war, and Hatim Talib al-Hamduni, an Isil military commander in Mosul.

“Their deaths, along with strikes against other ISIL leaders in the past month, have critically degraded ISIL's leadership experience in Mosul and removed two of their most senior military members in northern Iraq.”

Cook described al-Bajari as a former al-Qaida member who joined IS and oversaw its capture of Mosul in June 2014. He added that he “led the Isil Jaysh al-Dabiq battalion known for using vehicle-borne IEDs (homemade bombs), suicide bombers and mustard gas in its attacks.”

Al-Hamduni was the head of military police in the region of Mosul, Iraq’s largest city and IS’s de facto capital in the country. 

Hatim Talib al-Hamduni was a military commander in Mosul and the head of military police in the region, he added.

IS launched a sweeping offensive in June 2014, overrunning large areas in northern and western Iraq and eastern Syria, establishing a self-declared "Islamic Caliphate" in the land it captured.

However, it has recently lost large parts of the territory it once controlled, including the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Ramadi. The Iraqi army launched an operation in March to recapture Mosul, that has been under IS control since 2014.