From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
US confirms killing of top Islamic State cleric
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleThe US military confirms it killed a top Islamic State cleric in an airstrike.
Central Command says Tuesday that Turki al-Binali was killed on May 31. Activists and IS supporters reported his death at the time, but the military is only confirming it now.
The Bahraini cleric wrote religious justifications for the enslavement of thousands of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority and helped establish the IS branch in Libya. He rose to be one of the extremist group’s leading ideologues.
The military says Binali was killed in Mayadeen, an IS-held Syrian town near the Iraqi border.
Several senior Islamic State figures have been killed in recent years as the group has been driven from large parts of Syria and Iraq. US-backed forces recently pushed into Raqqa, the northern Syrian city that served as the group’s de facto capital.
— AP
The Times of Israel Community.