The Islamic State’s Leader is Dead Again … Maybe
The Islamic State’s Leader is Dead Again … Maybe
Last night, stories spread on Islamic State (IS) Telegram accounts that the “caliph”, Abu al-Hassan al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi, had been killed. This afternoon, IS’s spokesman, Abu Umar al-Muhajir, released his fourth speech, entitled, “So They Kill and Are Killed”, a short ten-minute statement ostensibly confirming that Abu al-Hassan was dead, and had been replaced by Abu al-Husayn al-Husayni al-Qurayshi. This is the second time this year that IS’s caliph has been proclaimed dead, though there are complications about what exactly is going on here.
THE MYSTERIOUS ABU AL-HASSAN
Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), the IS caliph appointed in May 2010 who famously appeared at the mosque in Mosul in July 2014 just after the caliphate declaration and led the group through the height of its global rampage, was killed in October 2019.
After Al-Badri was killed, Amir Muhammad al-Mawla (Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi) ascended to the helm. Al-Mawla was killed twenty-seven months later, in February 2022, without ever making a single public statement. The U.S. raid in Idlib in northern Syria that killed Al-Mawla took place not far from where Al-Badri was killed. There have been a number of senior IS leaders eliminated in northern Syria of late.
Abu al-Hassan was announced as Al-Mawla’s successor six weeks after Al-Mawla was killed. In terms of when, where, how, and by whom Abu al-Hassan was killed—assuming he has been (we will get to that)—we have essentially no information. Abu Umar said the caliph met his demise in an unplanned engagement, “fighting the enemies of God”, and left it there. There is a claim that Abu al-Hassan was killed over the weekend (or a week earlier) by the Al-Qaeda-derived jihadist group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which runs Idlib province in north-western Syria. Naturally, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)—under its “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) fig-leaf—which administers the U.S.-protected zone in north-eastern Syria claims that it is responsible for destroying the caliph in a joint operation with the Americans. The U.S. has disclaimed all knowledge of the details around Abu al-Hassan’s alleged demise.
Throughout Abu al-Hassan’s eight-month reign, the central question has been over his identity.
From this newsletter in March:
Hassan Hassan reported a month ago that the likely candidate for caliph was Bashar Khattab Ghazal al-Sumaidai, a senior judicial official in IS’s Shari’a Council, whose kunyas include Haji Zayd, Ustath Zayd (Professor Zaid), Abu Khattab al-Iraqi, Abu al-Muaz al-Iraqi, and Abu Ishaq. …
Another proposal from Reuters, relying on “two Iraqi security officials and one Western security source”, is Juma Awad al-Badri, the brother of Ibrahim al-Badri, the caliph killed in 2019. Juma, according to one of the Iraqi officials, joined the Iraqi jihad soon after Saddam Husayn’s regime came down in 2003; is the head of the Shura Council; and was known to “always accompany” his brother, acting as both “personal companion and Islamic legal adviser”. …
The final serious candidate at the present time to be the man behind the Abu al-Hassan mask is Ahmed Hamed Hussain al-Ithawi (or Abu Muslim al-Ithawi): “He is the Islamic State’s current governor of Iraq and was previously in charge of the Kawasir Brigade, an elite force part of the so-called Caliphate Army, in Anbar.” Of note: it seems Al-Ithawi was broken out of Abu Ghraib prison in July 2013, the capstone of the last BREAKING THE WALLS campaign.
In July, the United Nations reported:
The Monitoring Team says that Al-Sumaidai is “cited [by Member States] as the most likely candidate” and Juma al-Badri is noted as a candidate. While Al-Ithawi was not mentioned in the report, “Another Iraqi candidate cited by some Member States as a potential leader was the head of the [IS] general directorate of provinces, known as Abd al-Raouf al-Muhajir.” Still, the Monitoring Team says that Abu al-Hassan’s “identity is not yet established”, and there is no clarification available on the Turkish claim in May 2022 to have arrested Abu al-Hassan in Istanbul.
Turkey’s claim to have arrested the caliph got even more complicated in September when the Turkish ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, claimed that the man in custody was Al-Sumaidai, without directly saying that Al-Sumaidai was the caliph. And here is where things get very messy.
KUNYA GAMES
The central issue with the Turkish claims, which is central to unravelling the meaning of this announcement from IS that Abu al-Hassan is dead, is whether Al-Sumaidai is the man behind the “Abu al-Hassan” kunya.
When Erdogan spoke back in September, I found it unlikely the caliph would venture into Turkey (I still do), given that IS has the options for hideouts in the chaotic, nominally Turkish-controlled zones in north-west Syria; the desert sanctuaries in eastern Syria; and various urban and rural locales in Iraq. As such, I did not think the man in custody was likely to be Abu al-Hassan and, the Turkish official information environment being what it is, I was not even confident that they had correctly identified the person they held (again, still not). That said, until Al-Badri’s discovery in northern Syria in 2019 that was considered impossible: there was unanimous shock in the analytical “community” that the caliph was in Idlib.
The next announcement from Turkey was in early November: an indictment of the man they have in custody was released, revealing that he is facing an aggravated life sentence for trying to overthrow the state and being a member of a terrorist group, a charge also levelled at his wife, Makaram Taha Ali, arrested in the days after her husband’s capture. According to the indictment, the man said he was Al-Sumaidai and had been appointed caliph under the name Abu al-Hassan, albeit reluctantly: “Al-Sumaidai told prosecutors that he accepted the possibility of becoming the group’s new leader due to his popularity among fighters and since very few senior ranking officials were left in the group. But he said the declaration was made against his wishes.”
The detainee claimed to have been brought into IS in 2012 by “Abu Muslim al-Turkmani”, whose real name was Fadel al-Hiyali and who also used the kunya “Abu Mutaz al-Qurayshi”. Al-Hiyali was a very senior IS official by the time he was killed in the summer of 2015, having risen through the ranks alongside his long-time friend, one of the most important figures in IS’s history, Abdurrahman al-Qaduli (Abu Ali al-Anbari), who was killed a year after Al-Hiyali. Per the Turkish indictment, after Al-Hiyali’s downfall, the prisoner “said he rose through the ranks after becoming a confidante” of Al-Mawla’s, the caliph from 2019 to 2022.
The prisoner’s claims should be noted in a context where he also claims he “never fired a bullet against any of the group’s many enemies” and “denied ever being a part of the IS armed forces or sentencing anyone to death in his role as justice minister”. This kind of thing—senior IS detainees distancing themselves from the group’s atrocities and telling their captors what they think they want to hear, particularly about IS’s disarray and weakness—has a long history with the organisation, including Al-Mawla himself. Sometimes, IS detainees are doing more than ingratiating themselves to their captors and trying for more lenient sentencing.
DISINFORMATION DANGERS: A HISTORICAL CASE STUDY
In January 2006, IS’s founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), appointed “Abu Abdallah al-Rashid al-Baghdadi” to run the umbrella group, Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen (MSM), that IS was operating under at the time. After Zarqawi was killed in June 2006 and the Islamic State was formally proclaimed that October, with MSM as a component and a new leader, an Iraqi, Hamid al-Zawi (Abu Umar al-Baghdadi), the “Abu Abdallah” mystery largely faded—most assumed Abu Umar was “Abu Abdallah”—in favour of a new mystery, namely whether Abu Umar even existed.
The U.S. military suspected for some time after 2006 that the speeches in Abu Umar’s name were read by an actor, and IS was run by foreign Al-Qaeda veterans, specifically the Egyptian Abdul Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir). When IS’s media emir Khaled al-Mashadani was arrested in July 2007, he told the Coalition what they wanted to hear: Abu Umar was “fictional”, merely an Iraqi mask for the “foreign influence” within IS. Setting the U.S. to chasing its tail on that front diverted them away from the “Abu Abdallah” question and only when IS chose to tell us a decade later did we get an answer: “Abu Abdallah” was none other than Al-Qaduli, whom the U.S. had arrested in April 2006 and would hold until 2012, when he was released by the Iraqi government after the U.S. departure.
Al-Mashadani’s information operation shielded Al-Qaduli’s identity from the U.S.—they never knew who they held—and thus from understanding the need to take steps to prevent the release of such a dangerous man, who went on to play a crucial role practically in knitting together the caliphate in Syria, and whose ideological influence licensed some of the most infamous atrocities by the group. The stakes are therefore very high when it comes to being taken in by IS’s disinformation operations, and detained IS jihadists have a habit of being vectors for these operations.
WHAT IT ALL MEANS
In a situation that was already sufficiently murky because of the unreliability and agendas of the Turkish government, IS’s announcement that Abu al-Hassan is dead adds another layer of complication, but the answer still turns on the same questions we faced in September: Is the man in Turkish custody Al-Sumaidai? And is he—or was he—Abu al-Hassan?
Put simply there are four options:
Option One: The prisoner in Turkey is neither Al-Sumaidai nor was he ever Abu al-Hassan.
Option Two: The prisoner in Turkey is Al-Sumaidai and he was not Abu al-Hassan at the time he was arrested.
Option Three: The prisoner in Turkey is Al-Sumaidai and he was Abu al-Hassan at the time he was arrested.
Option Four: The prisoner in Turkey is not Al-Sumaidai, but he was Abu al-Hassan at the time he was arrested.
If (1) is true, it would mean Turkey was mistaken or misleading in its claims about the identity of the prisoner it picked up in May, and it would mean IS was likely telling the truth in announcing Abu al-Hassan’s demise today. Unusual as it might seem for IS’s leaders to killed in clashes where they are not the targets—that HTS nor the PKK nor the U.S. released a statement days ago claiming to have killed the caliph makes it unlikely that whoever did it, if it was done, had no idea who they had killed—it does happen. A famous case is Samir al-Khlifawi (Haji Bakr), killed in the turmoil around Aleppo as the Syrian rebellion went to war with IS in January 2014: he was the caliph’s deputy and one of the most powerful men in IS’s nascent police state; nobody knew it. More recently, there is the mysterious case of Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi, the IS spokesman admitted to be dead at the same time as Al-Mawla in March 2022: IS has released no details and once again nobody has claimed responsibility, likely meaning whoever did it was not going after Abu Hamza.
If (2) is correct, it would, again, likely mean IS is telling the truth, with all the implications above. The major difference, if (2) is true as opposed to (1), is it would mean the Turks look somewhat better: they at least got the name of their prisoner right. Ankara would still have been mistaken about him being IS’s leader, though, in fairness, the Turks have rather backed off from that claim: since Erdogan’s statement two months ago, the only statements claiming that the prisoner is the caliph have come from his (ostensible) confession.
There are two further aspects applying to both (1) and (2). First and less important, it would mean the semi-consensus among analysts and intelligence officials that Abu al-Hassan’s real identity was Al-Sumaidai is mistaken. Second, potentially much more important, it would invite the question: Why is Al-Sumaidai (or whoever he is) claiming to be Abu al-Hassan? Is he trying to help IS by muddying the waters and perhaps provoking statements from anti-IS forces that the group can definitively disprove, bringing discredit on their enemies? Has he legitimately “flipped” in prison and is trying to harm IS as much as possible? Has he spoken under Turkish pressure and/or inducement? Or perhaps not spoken at all and the Turks have simply invented his testimony?
The implications for (3) and (4) are very similar: if Abu al-Hassan was arrested by Turkey in May, it means that IS is lying and that what it has done today is an attempted information operation. Why IS would do this is clear enough: IS is notoriously unwilling in general to acknowledge its operatives once they are in enemy custody, and to have to admit that, for the first time in its history, its caliph had been captured alive—despite all the valorisation of “martyrdom”—would be highly embarrassing. By “killing off” Abu al-Hassan, IS can then say the Turks and their prisoner are lying—which, as laid out above, is hardly an implausible claim—and move on with whoever “Abu al-Husayn” turns out to be. If this has happened, it is a high-risk strategy. As Craig Whiteside has pointed out, IS well understands that “credibility is important in an ideological struggle”. If IS was caught in a deception as important as this—rivalling what the Taliban did over Mullah Muhammad Umar’s death—it would be far more damaging, to inter alia organisational cohesion, than the reputational cost of admitting the caliph had let himself be taken alive. It all comes down to “if”.
The only real difference between options (3) and (4) is that if (4) is true, it makes it possible that Al-Sumaidai is now the caliph.
At the end of an article like this, it feels like a bit of a cop-out to say something akin to “decide for yourself”, but on the present state of the available information my own view is that one just has to live with the uncertainty.
POSTSCRIPT: UPDATES
UPDATE (30 NOV 2022): A statement from CENTCOM said that Abu al-Hassan had been killed in “mid-October” in Deraa, in southern Syria near the border with Jordan, by “The Free Syrian Army” (or FSA), an unspecific descriptor that raises further questions.
UPDATE: A local outlet reported on 17 October—about an operation it is now clear took place on 15 October—that “a leader” of IS, known as Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Iraqi, had been killed in Jassem, a town in Deraa province. It seems plausible that Abu Abd al-Rahman was Abu al-Hassan.
The “Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Iraqi” kunya is interesting because it is the same as the one used by Zarqawi’s deputy at the time he was killed in 2006. The fate of Zarqawi’s deputy has never been clear. The U.S. claimed Abu Abd al-Rahman had inadvertently led them to Zarqawi and perished alongside his emir. However, a statement was released in Abu Abd al-Rahman’s name days later, which could be fake, and there have been more recent claims that Abu Abd al-Rahman was in an Iraqi jail. Who can say?
Another thread relates to “Abu Abdullah al-Hassani al-Qurayshi”, announced as Al-Badri’s deputy when he became emir/caliph in May 2011 and mentioned once more in August 2011 in the first speech by Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) after he was made IS’s spokesman, before disappearing. Maybe Al-Hassani was killed, but the fact IS has never said so makes it seem unlikely. The Quraysh moniker means Al-Hassani was eligible to be caliph: could he be one and the same with “Abu al-Hassan”?
These senior figures who turn up under kunyas and then fade away tend to reappear again in key positions—or, more precisely, to be revealed to us later by IS, since the level of operational security that shields their identities is indicative of their significance and once they are dead IS accords them recognition as martyrs and, in effect, saints, using their stories as motivation for recruits and examples to be emulated. “Abu Abdallah al-Rashid al-Baghdadi” (a.k.a. “Abu Abdallah al-Baghdadi”) being Al-Qaduli is one case. Then there is “Abu Ubayda Abd al-Hakim”, a shadowy figure in some IS media “appearances” in 2011 and the signatory on some captured letters sent to the wilayats after 2014, and “Ahmad al-Ta’i”, the media emir in IS’s second “cabinet” in 2009, presumed dead when he was replaced in 2011 with a triumvirate of consisting of Abu Muhammad al-Furqan (a.k.a. Dr. Wael al-Rawi), Amr al-Absi (Abu al-Atheer), and Bandar al-Shaalan. As it turned out, Abu Ubayda and Ahmad al-Ta’i were the same man as Abu Muhammad, and he had been at the top of the media apparatus the whole time from 2009 until his death in 2016: his real name was Wael al-Ta’i.
Along with Al-Qaduli and Falaha, Al-Ta’i is one of a handful of people without whom IS would probably be a different, and weaker, organisation. Whether Al-Hassani transpires to be within that elite pantheon or not—and whether or not he was Abu al-Hassan—the resolution to the mystery of his identity is likely to be interesting.
UPDATE (30 NOV 2022): Voice of America reported: “[T]he United States … had been aware of [Abu al-Hassan’s] demise for more than a month … [D]espite the lack of American involvement in the operation, U.S. officials were quickly brought in to examine the results. Based on evidence at the scene and subsequent DNA testing, the U.S. determined the FSA had in fact killed Abu al-Hassan, a U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity …, told VOA.”
This raises at least as many questions as it answers: When the U.S. official quoted in VOA claims the U.S. was able to “identify [Abu al-Hassan] though DNA”: even assuming the U.S. has the DNA of the man killed in Deraa from the Bucca days, how can they possibly have known he was the caliph? If they did, why did the U.S. wait until now to announce the caliph’s demise? How did the U.S. wait until now—we are really supposed to believe it has been known within the U.S. government for six weeks that the caliph is dead and it did not leak? And why, if the U.S. knew what had happened, was the spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, John Kirby, instructed to pretend he did not earlier today, saying he had no “operational details” about how Abu al-Hassan was killed?
UPDATE (1 DEC 2022): Elizabeth Tsurkov reported from sources who say they were involved in the operation that “FSA” in this case referred to rebels who had been “reconciled” to the Asad/Iran system when the U.S. stood aside to allow the reconquest of an area they had “guaranteed” in the summer of 2018. (The other option with this reference to the “FSA” was the last remaining U.S.-supported rebel group, Jaysh Maghawir al-Thawra, based at Tanf in the south-east.)
Tsurkov’s sources say that after IS assassinated a series of tribal shaykhs in Deraa, a Syrian IS member was captured on 14 August and under interrogation disclosed that a senior IS official, one Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Iraqi, was based in the area. When the “reconciled” rebels tracked Abu Abd al-Rahman down on 15 October, he and another IS official with him blew themselves up; the rebels had no idea this was the caliph.
The “reconciled” rebels acted alone, according to those who spoke to Tsurkov: they had ostensibly been offered assistance by the Asad regime in this operation, but had refused it on two grounds: (1) they did not want to give an opening for the regime’s secret police to return, since this leads to repression and abuse everywhere it has happened; and (2) they know well the Asad regime’s record of working alongside IS and manipulating jihadism in order to defeat the rebellion, including since the “reconciliation” in 2018: joint rebel-regime operations in Deraa have netted IS fighters, only for the regime to later release them and these jihadists have gone on to assassinate “reconciled” rebel leaders.
UPDATE (1 DEC 2022): Wael Essam of Al-Quds al-Arabi reported from sources that Abu al-Hassan’s real name was Nur Karim al-Matni, a member of Albu Ubayd tribe in the town of Rawa, about one-hundred miles north-west up the Euphrates River from Ramadi in the Anbar province of western Iraq. Rawa was the town where IS set up its first training camp on Iraq soil.
According to Essam, Al-Matni’s brother and seven other family members were abducted in the Adhamiya neighbourhood of Baghdad in 2005 and murdered by the Wolf Brigade, a notorious commando unit ostensibly serving the Iraqi state, while in reality being controlled by Iran’s Badr Corps. Another of Al-Matni’s brothers, Firas, is allegedly detained in Idlib, presumably by HTS. And yet other relatives currently work in IS’s global Al-Rawi Financial Network, sanctioned by the U.S. in 2019 and 2020. Essam says that Al-Matni took over as IS’s governor of Baghdad in 2010 after Manaf al-Rawi was arrested, becoming known as “Sayf al-Baghdad” (The Sword of Baghdad), and around the time the caliphate was declared, in 2014, moved to Al-Bukamal, the town just within eastern Syria, on the border opposite the Iraqi town of Al-Qa’im in the far-west of Anbar province.
Still, Essam notes the caution of Raed al-Hamid, an analyst who has done a lot of work on IS’s structure, that the issue of whether Al-Sumaidai (assuming that is who the Turks have in prison) was ever “Abu al-Hassan” is not resolved. The nagging doubt for Al-Hamid is the same as the one expressed above: Why is Al-Sumaidai claiming he was “Abu al-Hassan” when he was arrested? If Al-Sumaidai (assume it is him for the sake of argument) is telling the truth, and IS switched the “Abu al-Hassan” title to Al-Matni after Al-Sumaidai’s arrest, it “leads us to the conclusion that Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Iraqi was not the emir of the organisation and that he was, in his reality, the governor of southern Syria, and no more”, says Al-Hamid. Again, this is high-risk for IS: the cost is high if it is caught—but that “if” is a rather large one.
UPDATE (1 DEC 2022): The SDF/PKK put out a statement revoking its earlier claim to have killed Abu al-Hassan, saying it “never participated in the operation”.
UPDATE (1 DEC 2022): The 367th edition of Al-Naba, IS’s weekly newsletter, had Abu Umar’s speech on its front page and in place of the main editorial on page three.
UPDATE (20 DEC 2022): Turkish media reported that “the Eighth Division” (or the Eighth Brigade), one of the “reconciled” rebel units in Deraa, has exhumed what they believe to be the body of Abu al-Hassan, from Jassem, and handed it over to the United States.