The airstrikes that have killed two senior Islamic State figures are just the most recent examples in an increasingly effective campaign to wipe out the group’s top leadership in Iraq and Syria.
Coalition commanders are crediting improved intelligence. Some of the best information has come from disillusioned senior members within IS who believe the group’s collapse, as a governing force at least, is now imminent. One such example was inadvertently revealed when President Trump boasted to the Russians about the “great intel” he was receiving, in this case warning of a plot passed on by an agent inside IS working on behalf of Israel.
The coalition has yet to scoop the big prize, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis’s self-declared caliph, though he has been wounded at least once. Other surviving figures are believed to include Abu Muhammad al-Shimali, the Saudi-Iraqi senior recruiter of foreign fighters who has been implicated in the Brussels and Paris attacks. The US has put a bounty of $5 million on his head.
Abu Luqman is the Syrian emir of Raqqa province, the Isis stronghold now under attack from coalition-backed forces in Syria, and a member of the Isis governing council. Abul-Hasan Al-Muhajir became the group’s official spokesman last August when his predecessor Abu Mohammad al-Adnani was killed.
Coalition commanders admit that the killing of senior figures is unlikely on its own to destroy the group. More critical, perhaps, is the loss of territory that helped to generate the revenues that has sustained the group.
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Washington is also turning its attentions to Syrian-based al-Qaeda figures which it fears may become a longer-term threat to the West after Isis is defeated.
