Baghdad // Iraq claimed on Sunday to have struck a convoy carrying ISIL group leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in an air raid near the Syrian border.
While the rebel leader’s fate remains unknown, hospital sources and residents said the air strike killed several leaders but Baghdadi was not among them.
Iraqi aircraft hit Baghdadi’s convoy as it was “moving towards Karabla to attend a meeting of the Daesh terrorist leaders”, an Iraqi security statement said.
The statement said Baghdadi was “transported in a vehicle” after the strike but added that “his health status was unknown”.
Karabla is on the Euphrates less than five kilometres from the Syrian border in western Anbar, a vast Iraqi province which has long been a Sunni insurgent stronghold.
The meeting place was also struck in the operation and several ISIL leaders already gathered there were killed or wounded, it said.
Interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan said that the strike took place at noon on Saturday.
In Washington, a US military official said: “We’ve seen the Iraqi statement about Al Baghdadi but have no [information] that confirms it.”
Baghdadi’s death would give the war against the most violent extremist organisation in modern history a much-needed boost, but such claims have been made in the past.
The ISIL leader’s apparent survival following similar claims, including one in November 2014 of a strike in the same area, has only added to his mystique.
Baghdadi is said to have been born in Samarra in 1971, but little is known about the man with a US$10 million (Dh36.73m) US bounty on his head.
He apparently joined the insurgency after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, at one point spending time in an American military prison in the country’s south.
His whereabouts have been the subject of constant speculation since his only public appearance as ISIL chief last year, at a mosque in the Iraqi city of Mosul days after the proclamation of a cross-border “caliphate”.
A coalition led by the United States, which occupied Iraq for eight years before withdrawing in 2011, began air strikes against ISIL in August last year.
More than 7,000 strikes later, ISIL has conceded some of territory it took last year but has held its ground in other areas and even made fresh conquests, such as the city of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.
* Agence France-Presse and Reuters
