The new leader of the Islamic State group is “a nobody” with little apparent reputation but the United States hopes he will be killed soon, a US official says.
The group last week announced Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi as its new leader after a US commando raid killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the chief of the ultra-violent movement.
A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that monitoring of Islamic State social media indicates that even followers do not know much about Hashimi.
“That has become a major issue in, if you will, the ISIS social media world. This guy appears to be a nobody,” the official tells reporters.
“What little we know about him, we’re not impressed. And if he’s in Iraq or Syria, we don’t think he’s too long for the world anyway,” he says.
— AP
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