Has Turkey Arrested the Islamic State’s “Caliph”?
“Ask, and it shall be given you”. Recently, I asked, somewhat snarkily, whatever happened to Turkey’s announcement in May that it had arrested the Islamic State’s (IS) “caliph”. Well, now we have an answer—and more questions.
In February, the U.S. killed IS’s leader and the next month IS named a new one, Abu al-Hassan al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi. On 26 May, the Turkish news site OdaTV reported that, after surveillance by the National Intelligence Organisation (MiT), a raid had been carried out by Turkish police in Istanbul a week earlier that arrested Abu al-Hassan without a shot being fired, adding that Turkey’s ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would give full details “in the coming days”. “Senior Turkish officials” confirmed to Bloomberg News that the arrest had taken place. Then silence, until last night.
During Erdogan’s trip to Serbia on 8 September he announced that the man arrested in May was Bashar Khattab Ghazal al-Sumaidai. Erdogan described Al-Sumaidai as among the “senior executives” of IS and a “qadi” (shari’a judge) in the IS education and judicial ministries.
Pictures were circulated by the Turks showing the IS operative arrested in May. One of the pictures shows the man as he was being detained wearing a wig, the efficacy of which as a disguise is open to question:
Shortly after the demise of the last caliph in February, before Abu al-Hassan was announced as the successor, Hassan Hassan reported over at New Lines that Al-Sumaidai was the “likeliest candidate” to take over as leader. In July, by which time Abu al-Hassan was publicly in position, the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team supported this assessment, saying that when it came to Abu al-Hassan’s real identity, Al-Sumaidai was “cited [by Member States] as the most likely candidate”.
It is, therefore, important to note that Erdogan, in his statement yesterday, did not claim that Al-Sumaidai was the caliph or use the kunya “Abu al-Hassan” to identify him. The Turkish reports all cited “Haji Zayd” and “Ustath Zayd” (Professor Zayd) as the codenames Al-Sumaidai had been working under.
The Islamic State has not yet commented on this, and since this week’s edition of its newsletter, Al-Naba, is already out, we will likely have to wait until next week to find out what their version of events is—unless the group chooses to put out a shorter written statement through Amaq or an audio statement from the spokesman Abu Umar al-Muhajir.
In the meantime, the options for what is going on here seem to be three:
Since this is Turkey, where the official information environment is notoriously at odds with reality on so many things, the man in custody is not Al-Sumaidai, and thus Al-Sumaidai may well be (or may not be) Abu al-Hassan.
Al-Sumaidai is in custody, and he is Abu al-Hassan, in which case, for the first time in IS’s history, its emir has been captured alive.
Al-Sumaidai is in custody, and he is not Abu al-Hassan.
The arrest of senior IS officials in Turkey—and in the chaotic Turkish-held areas of northern Syria, where several IS leaders have also been killed, two caliphs among them—has become a semi-regular occurrence since late 2017, when the caliphate was reduced to shreds.1 In this environment, with fairly robust IS networks in Turkey, and given the efforts IS goes to in obscuring the identities of its leaders—with multiple and overlapping kunyas, its prisoners feeding carefully calibrated misinformation to authorities to protect more important operatives, and so on—the potential for honest instances of mistaken identity are legion, before even factoring in the difficulties surrounding information that comes from this Turkish government.
Personally, I doubt very strongly that IS’s caliph would leave “Syraq”: IS’s leaders were able to give the U.S. the run-around for years when the Americans had 120,000 troops on the ground in Iraq and now they have hideouts in Syria, both the more “in plain sight” option of the packed free-for-all in Idlib and their desert sanctuaries in the east. And I doubt even more strongly the caliph would allow himself to be taken alive. By implication, I find possibility (2) above unlikely, and would answer “no” to my headline. It’s the wilderness of mirrors after that, though, as to what actually has happened.
NOTES
The caliphate was in tatters for about eighteen months before it was eliminated entirely in early 2019. During this period and since, senior IS officials sought safer ground. Those who got caught after choosing Turkish-administered territories include: IS’s “finance minister” Sami Jassim al-Jaburi (Haji Hamid) in October 2021; a former member of Saddam Husayn’s security apparatus and an administrative official for IS who played a role in IS’s chemical weapons program, Jamal al-Mashadani (Abu Hamza al-Kurdi), in November 2018; and a senior religious official on the Delegated Committee, Ismail al-Ithawi (Abu Zayd al-Iraqi), in February 2018. Seda Dudarkaeva, the wife of the notorious Chechen IS commander, Tarkhan Batirashvili (Abu Umar al-Shishani), was also picked up in Istanbul in July 2018.