New ISIS Leader Captured Months After Previous Chief Was Killed

The new leader of ISIS has been captured just three months after the terrorist group’s last chief was killed.

Abu al-Hassan al-Qurayshi was reportedly captured in a recent raid in Istanbul

He is said to be the brother of slain former ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and took over as chief just three months ago after the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Quraishi, 45.

The death of Qurayshi was another crushing blow to ISIS two years after the violent Sunni Muslim group lost long-time leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a similar raid in 2019.

Ibrahim al-Quraishi, who was otherwise known as ‘The Professor’ and had a $10million bounty on his head, set off a suicide bomb that killed himself as well as members of his family, after US forces swooped in on his northern Syrian camp.

Yet now anti-terror police believe they have captured the elusive new leader of ISIS, of whom there are no known photographs in existence.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to announce al-Hassan al-Qurayshi’s capture in the coming days, OdaTV said.

Officials said the terror chief was arrested after a long police surveillance and that no shots were fired during the raid.

Analysts in various countries agree ISIS is under more pressure than it’s ever been and will never restore its self-styled caliphate. But they are divided on how significant a setback Qurayshi’s death is for the group.

Some say the fight against ISIS will suck in the United States and its allies for years to come as it develops into a permanent insurgency with new leaders ready to take the reins.

‘In Syria, Islamic State units work as a devolved network of individual groups in order to avoid them being targeted. We don’t therefore believe that Qurayshi’s death will have an enormous impact,’ one of the Iraqi security officials said.

‘It’s also become more difficult to follow them because they’ve long stopped using mobile phones for communication.’

Since their territorial defeat in Iraq in 2017 and Syria in 2019, Islamic State leaders have found it increasingly easy to move between the two countries, helped by a gap in areas of control between different armed forces, some officials say.

Security and military officials said the 600 km (372 mile)long border with Syria made it a very hard for Iraqi forces to prevent militants infiltrating via underground tunnels.

Lahur Talabany, former counter-terrorism chief for Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, said some IS leaders can travel on a route across the full expanse of Iraq.

‘When you see attacks increasing in a particular area I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody important has been through that region,’ he told Reuters.

‘The caliphate was defeated but ISIS was never eradicated. I don’t believe we managed to finish the job.’

Source: Daily Mail