BEIRUT (AP) – When Syrian rebels attacked a hideout in the southern Syrian village of Yassem in mid-October, little did they know that a militant commander killed in the operation was the leader of the “Islamic State” group.
Syrian opposition figures and state media apparently did not know that the man killed was IS leader Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and identified him as Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi.
The operation lasted two days and began on October 14, the day after a bus bombing in a suburb of the capital Damascus. This attack killed 18 Syrian soldiers and wounded at least 27 others.
Syrian state media reported at the time that the authorities had received information that IS members had hideouts in the northern districts of Jassem, about 60 kilometers south of Damascus. The operation matched Syrian troops with former rebels who reconciled with the government in 2018 and were allowed to remain in southern Daraa province and keep their weapons. The state news agency SANA spoke of a joint operation against the alleged militant hiding place.
Amid the intensity of the fighting, an Iraqi IS commander known as Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi allowed his family to flee the house he was staying in, and once they were outside and he was completely surrounded, the Iraqi citizen set himself on fire A belt of explosives According to Rami Abdurrahman, head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, he killed himself.
At a nearby house, rebels surrounded and blew up the hideout of two other IS fighters, a Lebanese and a Syrian, killing them both, Abdurrahman said.
According to the Syrian state news agency SANA, three rebels were killed and seven others injured in the battle in Jassem, which lasted from the late hours of October 14 until the next day. During the fighting, Syrian troops imposed a curfew on the village, SANA said.
The operation didn’t draw much attention outside of Syria at the time, but on Wednesday an IS spokesman released audio saying the group’s leader, al-Qurayshi, was recently killed in combat, without giving further details.
“We were surprised that the man killed was the leader of Daesh,” said Ahmed al-Masalmeh, who used an Arabic acronym for the group “Islamic State.” Al-Masalmeh is an opposition activist from Daraa who now lives in Jordan but keeps in touch with the rebels at home. He added that the information they had at the time was that the man killed was Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, who was believed to be the IS commander in southern Syria.
Al-Masalmeh said rebels in southern Syria had reliable information that a senior IS commander was stationed in the south of the country after another commander was killed in the region over the summer.
Hours after IS made the announcement, the US military said al-Qurayshi was killed in mid-October, adding that the operation was carried out by Syrian rebels in Daraa.
The latest killing shows that the three IS leaders, all Iraqis, have been killed in Syria in recent years, outside of areas the militant group once claimed to dominate. Two were killed by the US military in Syria’s rebel-held northwestern Idlib province, while the third was killed in southern Syria, far from the former domains of the so-called caliphate.
Little was known about al-Qurayshi, who assumed leadership of the group after the death of his predecessor Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in a US attack in February in north-western Syria.
The group’s founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was hunted down by Americans in a raid in Idlib in October 2019.
IS spokesman Abu Omar al-Muhajer said in the audio that Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurayshi was appointed as the new leader of the group.