The United States is trying to verify that an airstrike recently killed a high-ranking ISIS commander, and the Pentagon confirmed Wednesday that in a separate action it took out a commander of the Pakistani Taliban who was responsible for the deaths of more than 130 children.
U.S. warplanes targeted senior ISIS operative Omar al-Shishani in Iraq in the past few days, some four months after the coalition first thought it had killed him in Syria, according to two U.S. officials. The United States is still trying to confirm they got him this time, the U.S. officials said.
Al-Shishani, also known as “Omar the Chechen,” was targeted by an airstrike near Qarayyah, Iraq, south of Mosul, the officials said. But they would not speak publicly until it’s certain this time that he is dead. If he has been killed in Iraq, it’s a sign that top ISIS operatives are still able to move around the region with some degree of freedom.
ISIS appeared to confirm Wednesday that al-Shishani was killed. The group’s media wing, Amaq, citing an unspecified “military source,” said he was killed in Sharqat while fighting to defend Mosul. Sharqat is just south of Qarayyah, where the U.S. officials said he was killed.
The Amaq report did not say when or how al-Shishani was killed.
There was no direct statement from ISIS about al-Shishani, though dozens of ISIS supporters have posted online commentaries memorializing his death and sharing his photograph.
In March, the United States thought it killed al-Shishani in Syria when he traveled there to visit ISIS fighters.
But then ISIS posted a message saying he had been injured but survived. U.S. officials privately acknowledged they might have erred in claiming he was dead, although some continued to say the U.S. airstrike killed him, with some officials saying he might have died several days later of his wounds.
Al-Shishani was long considered one of ISIS’s most capable military commanders. With a $5 million reward on his head, he once served in an elite Georgian military unit before joining ISIS in 2013. He is also thought to have been involved in running a prison in Raqqa, Syria, where foreign hostages were held.
In a separate strike July 9 that some U.S. officials said involved an American drone, the United States killed a top commander in the Pakistani Taliban, known as the TTP, in eastern Afghanistan, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
The commander, Khalifa Umar Mansoor, orchestrated multiple terrorist operations in Pakistan, including the January 2016 attack on Bacha Khan University, the September 2015 Badaber Air Force Base attack, and the December 2014 Peshawar school attack that killed more than 130 children, the Pentagon said.