Iraqi official says wounded IS chief alive in Syria

An Iraqi interior ministry official says the Islamic State group’s head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is alive and being treated at a field hospital in Syria after being wounded in an airstrike.

“We have irrefutable information and documents from sources within the terrorist organization that al-Baghdadi is still alive and hiding” in Syria’s northeastern Jazira region, says intelligence and counterterrorism department head Abu Ali al-Basri, quoted today in the government daily As-Sabah.

IS retains a significant presence in the desert plains of northeastern Syria’s Hasakeh province despite having lost most of its cross-border “caliphate,” which once also covered a third of neighboring Iraq.

Basri says that Baghdadi is suffering from “injuries, diabetes and fractures to the body and legs that prevent him from walking without assistance.”

The jihadist chief had been wounded in “air raids against IS strongholds in Iraq.”

Last June, Russia said it had probably killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a late May air raid near Raqqa in Syria, but later said it was still trying to verify his fate.

In September, an American military chief said the jihadist chief was still alive and probably hiding in eastern Syria’s Euphrates Valley.

— AFP