The US military was targeted The global leader of ISIS in an airstrike in Somalia late last month, but could not confirm whether he was killed, three US officials said.
The US government has publicly identified Abdulgadir Mumin as the head of ISIS’s Somalia branch.but two US officials say he quietly became the terrorist group’s world leader last year.
US Africa Command issued a statement On May 31, it said it carried out an airstrike against ISIS militants in a remote area 81 km (50 miles) southeast of Bosaso, Somalia, killing three militants. AFRICOM’s statement did not say who the US targeted and who was killed. AFRICOM said no civilians were killed in the strike.
Three U.S. officials now say Momin was targeted in the operation, though they have no confirmation of his death.
A senior administration official confirmed that the United States had struck a high-ranking ISIS target in Somalia, but declined to name the individual and said the United States was still working to verify the outcome.
A senior defense official says ISIS in Somalia is relatively small, with only 100 to 200 fighters, all based in northern Somalia. But there are other smaller ISIS groups in parts of Africa, including Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.
ISIS still has thousands of fighters around the world. Mainly in northern Iraq and northeastern SyriaAccording to US intelligence agencies.
But because the US has been effective against ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria, ISIS leaders see Africa as “a place where they have to invest, where they can operate more permissively and better and more freely, and they want to expand ISIS.” cell there. Thus, they brought the caliph to that region,” said a senior defense official. The official added that the cells around Africa have expanded due to the strategic direction of the ISIS leadership.
The official said that ISIS militants in Somalia operate more effectively in certain ways by avoiding other terrorist networks operating in the country, including the FBI and Interpol, and by sharing tactics, techniques and procedures such as financing.
The U.S. says it is responsible for deadly attacks in Somalia over the past decade, including the 2019 killing of a justice official in his home and the 2016 seizure and months-long occupation of a town in the Puntland region.
In 2016, the United States specifically designated him as a global terrorist, saying he poses a risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the safety of US citizens or US national security, foreign policy, or the economy.
Two U.S. officials say Mumin’s takeover as the latest global leader of ISIS was not widely known. He replaced Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, who was killed in the fighting in Syria at the end of 2022. ISIS’s two previous global leaders, including its most prominent leader, Abu Bakr al-BaghdadiThey killed themselves when cornered during US military raids.
Mosheh Wins contributed.