BEIRUT // Top ISIL leader Omar Al Shishani, known as Omar the Chechen, was “seriously injured” in a recent attack in north-eastern Syria but survived despite US suggestions to the contrary, a monitoring group said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday that according to its sources the March 4 attack had targeted the jihadist’s convoy, killing his bodyguards, while Al Shishani “was seriously injured”.
“He’s not dead,” the observatory’s director Rami Abdel Rahman said.
“He was taken from the province of Hasake to a hospital in Raqqa province, where he was treated by a jihadist doctor of European origin,” he said.
Raqqa is ISIL’s main stronghold.
The United States had stopped short of declaring Shishani dead, but a US official speaking on condition of anonymity said Al Shishani “likely died” in the assault by waves of warplanes and drones, along with 12 other ISIL fighters.
The US official branded Shishani “the ISIL equivalent of the secretary of defence”.
Al Shishani, from Georgia, was one of the ISIL leaders most wanted by Washington, which put a US$5 million (Dh18.3m) bounty on his head.
Al Shishani fought as a Chechen rebel against Russian forces before joining the Georgian military in 2006, and fought Russian forces again in Georgia in 2008.
He resurfaced in northern Syria in 2012 as the leader of a battalion of foreign fighters, said Aymenn Jawad Al Tamimi, research fellow at the Middle East Forum, a US think tank.
As early as May 2013, when ISIL was just emerging in Syria, he was appointed the group’s military commander for the north of the country, Al Tamimi said.
While Al Shishani’s exact rank is unclear, Richard Barrett of the US-based Soufan Group has described him as ISIL’s “most senior military commander”, adding that he has been in charge of key battles.
“He is clearly a very capable commander and has the loyalty of Chechen fighters who are considered by ISIL as elite troops,” Mr Barrett said.
Al Shishani is not, however, a member of ISIL’s political leadership, a structure that is even murkier than its military command.
The lack of a US presence on the ground makes it difficult to assess the success of operations targeting militants in Syria, and Al Shishani’s death has been falsely reported several times.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook on Tuesday described Al Shishani as “a battle-tested leader with experience who had led ISIL fighters in numerous engagements in Iraq and Syria”.
The March 4 strikes took place near Al Shadadi, a town in northeastern Syria that was retaken from ISIL last month by local anti-ISIL fighters.
* Agence France-Presse
