BAGHDAD // Iraq was investigating on Sunday whether ISIL chief Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi was killed in airstrikes by coalition warplanes targeting the group’s leaders.
The death of the elusive Mr Al Baghdadi would be a major victory for the US-led coalition of countries carrying out airstrikes against ISIL and providing assistance to Iraqi forces fighting to regain large areas of Iraq that the militants have overrun.
The announcement of the strikes came after president Barack Obama unveiled plans to send up to 1,500 more US troops to Iraq to advise and train the country’s forces, deepening Washington’s commitment to the open-ended war against ISIL.
Mr Obama said on Sunday that it was time to go on the offensive against the militants after blunting their advance.
“The air strikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL’s capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making,” Mr Obama said. “Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing them back.”
“We will provide them close air support once they are prepared to start going on the offence”, Obama said.
A senior Iraqi intelligence official said there was no “accurate information” on whether Mr Al Baghdadi was killed but that authorities were investigating.
“The information is from unofficial sources and was not confirmed until now, and we are working on that,” the official said.
US Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, on Saturday said that coalition aircraft conducted a “series of airstrikes” against “a gathering of [ISIL] leaders near Mosul”.
“We cannot confirm if [ISIL] leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi was among those present,” said Centcom spokesman Patrick Ryder.
The US-led strikes late on Friday were a further sign of “the pressure we continue to place on the ISIL terrorist network”, he said.
The aim was to squeeze the group and ensure it had “increasingly limited freedom to manoeuvre, communicate and command”.
“I can’t absolutely confirm that Baghdadi has been killed,” General Nicholas Houghton, the chief of staff of the British armed forces, told BBC television on Sunday. “Probably it will take some days to have absolute confirmation.”
Washington has offered a $10 million reward for his capture.
In neighbouring Syria, more than 1,000 people, most of them ISIL militants, have been killed in the battle for the town of Kobani since ISIL launched an offensive aiming to take it nearly two months ago, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
The Kurdish fighters defending the town have been joined by Syrian rebels who have fought both president Bashar Al Assad’s regime and ISIL, as well as by Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces.
The Observatory also said on Sunday that Syrian regime airstrikes on a town held by ISIL killed 21 civilians and wounded 100.
Aircraft dropped seven barrel bombs and other explosives late on Saturday on the ISIL-held town of Al Bab north-east of the city of Aleppo, it said.
Syrian rebels and local Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra also seized the southern town of Nawa on Sunday from troops loyal to Mr Al Assad after months of intense fighting, the Observatory said.
While ISIL is rapidly gaining support among Islamist militants, only marginal organisations and isolated individuals are formally expressing their allegiance, experts say.
Of the five main Al Qaeda offshoots — in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, the Sahel and Yemen — none has recognised the authority of Mr Al Baghdadi, who at the end of June proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria, with himself as “leader for Muslims everywhere”.
“For the moment, those rallying behind [ISIL] are on the margins, not at the centre,” said Dominique Thomas, an expert in Islamist groups at the Paris-based School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.
“They are small groups or marginalised individuals looking for recognition. They are proclaiming their allegiance to show they exist,” Mr Thomas said.
The expert cited as an example the declaration of allegiance to ISIL made in September by the Algerian group Jund Al Khilifa, which hit the headlines by kidnapping and then beheading French hiker Herve Gourdel.
“This is a group that has been in conflict for a long time with [the head of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb Abdelmalek] Droukdel,” he said.
Some heavyweight Al Qaeda groups have voiced support “because it’s impossible not to support them when faced with the common enemy of the United States, but support and allegiance are two different things”, said Mr Thomas.
But as ISIL stays in the headlines, the leaders of more established militant groups are seeing their supporters drawn to the relatively new force.
ISIL has targeted young people with propaganda on the web and has made extensive use of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to radicalise them.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, a specialist on radical Islam at Sciences Po research institute in Paris, said ISIL had “definitively dethroned Al Qaeda as the ultimate reference point for global jihad.”
“All the major jihadist groups have voiced support in the face of the bombing campaign by the United States. They haven’t, however, expressed allegiance to Baghdadi because this process of integration would require a ‘globalisation’ of the confrontation”, said Mr Filiu.
Mr Thomas said that the more western bombs fall on ISIL and the more the extremist group resists, the more attractive it will be to would-be militants.
* Agence France-Presse, Associated Press
