Key Daesh leader killed in Syria, group confirms

Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, one of Daesh’s longest-serving and most prominent leaders, was killed in Syria, the group’s Amaq news agency reported.

The jihadi group’s spokesman was killed “while surveying the operations to repel the military campaigns against Aleppo”, Amaq said on Tuesday.

Amaq did not say how Adnani was killed.

Daesh reportedly published a eulogy dated 29 August, which, however, gave no further details.

The Guardian reports that in January, Iraq said that Adnani had been wounded in an airstrike in the western province of Anbar and then moved to the northern city of Mosul, the group’s capital in Iraq.

Adnani had pledged allegiance to al-Qaida, the group from which Daesh splintered, more than a decade ago and was once imprisoned by US forces in Iraq, according to the Brookings Institution.

He has been the chief propagandist for the ultra-hardline jihadi group since he declared in a June 2014 statement that it was establishing a modern-day caliphate spanning large swaths of territory it had seized in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Adnani has often been the face of Daesh, such as when he issued a message in May urging attacks on the US and Europe during the holy month of Ramadan.

Daesh holds territory in the province of Aleppo, but not in the city where rebels are fighting Syrian government forces.

Recent advances by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias, and by Syrian rebels backed by Turkey, have made inroads into Deash holdings in Aleppo province, cutting them off from the Turkish border and supply lines along it.