SYRIAN AIR RAIDS KILL AT LEAST 21
The air raids struck the town of al-Bab in Aleppo province late Saturday and lasted through early Sunday morning. The Aleppo Media Center activist collective and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights both reported the attacks.
Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman said there were 10 strikes in total, including seven so-called barrel bombs dropped from helicopters. He said at least 21 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. The Aleppo Media Center put the death toll at 30, with 85 wounded.
— Associated Press
Iraq’s Defense and Interior ministries both issued statements saying al-Baghdadi had been wounded, without elaborating, and the news was broadcast on state-run television Sunday night.
The reports came at a time when President Barack Obama said the U.S.-led coalition was in a position to start going on the offensive against the Islamic State militants.
Al-Baghdadi, believed to be in his early 40s, has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Since taking the reins of the group in 2010, he has transformed it from a local branch of al-Qaida into an independent transnational military force.
He has positioned himself as perhaps the pre-eminent figure in the global jihadi community. His forces have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq, killed thousands of people, beheaded Westerners and drawn the U.S. troops and warplanes back into the region, where Washington is leading a campaign of airstrikes by a multinational coalition.
An Interior Ministry intelligence official said al-Baghdadi was wounded by an Iraqi airstrike that came during a meeting Saturday with militants in the town of Qaim. The official cited informants within the militant group. A senior Iraqi military official also said he learned in operational meetings that al-Baghdadi had been wounded.
The operation was carried out by Iraqi security forces, both officials said, although they did not know how seriously al-Baghdadi was hurt. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity.
A statement posted Sunday on the official Facebook page of Defense Minister Khalid Obeidi also said al-Baghdadi was wounded, but added that he was targeted in the northern city of Mosul, currently the group’s biggest stronghold in Iraq. A senior U.S. defense official said Saturday that the coalition conducted a series of airstrikes targeting a gathering of Islamic State leaders near Mosul, but he could not confirm whether al-Baghdadi was part of the gathering.
Reports circulated Saturday that al-Baghdadi may have been wounded in an airstrike, but there was no confirmation at that time from either U.S. or Iraqi officials.
When asked about the Iraqi reports, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said Sunday: “We have no information to corroborate reports that ISIL leader al-Baghdadi has been injured.”
Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said some Islamic State militants wounded in the airstrike near Qaim were taken across the frontier to the Syrian border town of Boukamal.
“They brought ISIS injured to Aisha Hospital in Boukamal. We don’t know if somebody died there or not. We know for sure that they brought some of the ISIS people injured in Roummaneh to the hospital,” Abdurrahman said.
There was no indication that al-Baghdadi was among those brought to Boukamal.
The reclusive al-Baghdadi is known to have made only one public appearance, purportedly delivering a sermon at a mosque in Mosul, as seen in a video posted online in June. That came five days after his group declared the establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, in the territories it holds in Iraq and Syria. The group proclaimed al-Baghdadi its leader and demanded that all Muslims pledge allegiance to him.
Since then, part of the Islamic State group’s core strategy has been to establish administration over lands that it controls to project an image of itself as more than just a fighting force. In parts of Syria under its control, the group administers courts, repairs roads and even polices traffic. It recently imposed a curriculum in schools in Mosul and in its Syrian stronghold, Raqqa, scrapping subjects such as philosophy and chemistry, and fine-tuning the sciences to fit with its ideology.
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