(Zaman Al Wasl)- Residents on Syria’s Barisha village said they found the vest of Abu Bakr al-Baghdaid, the world's most wanted man that he was wearing in a propaganda video eared last May.
The shadowy leader is dead after being targeted by a U.S. military raid, President Donald Trump said Sunday.
"Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead," Trump announced at the White House, saying the U.S. had "brought the world's number one terrorist leader to justice."
Barisha, home of 7,000 inhabitants, lies is nominally under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an outfit that includes ex-members of Al-Qaeda's former Syria affiliate.
But ISIS sleeper cells and the Al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Deen group are also present in the area, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor says.
The killing of al-Baghdadi marks a significant foreign policy success for Trump, coming at one of the lowest points in his presidency as he is mired in impeachment proceedings and facing widespread Republican condemnation for his Syria policy.
The recent pullback of U.S. troops he ordered from northeastern Syria raised a storm of bipartisan criticism in Washington that the militant group could regain strength after it had lost vast stretches of territory it had once controlled.
Al-Baghdadi's presence in the village, a few kilometers from the Turkish border, would come as a surprise, even if some IS leaders are believed to have fled to Idlib after losing their last sliver of territory in Syria to U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in March. The surrounding areas are largely controlled by an IS rival, the al-Qaida-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, although other jihadi groups sympathetic to IS operate there. Unverified video circulated online by Syrian groups appeared to support the Observatory claim that the operation occurred in Barisha.
Al-Baghdadi has led ISIS for the last five years, presiding over its ascendancy as it cultivated a reputation for beheadings and attracted tens of thousands of followers to a sprawling and self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria. He remained among the few IS commanders still at large despite multiple claims in recent years about his death and even as his so-called caliphate dramatically shrank, with many supporters who joined the cause either imprisoned or jailed.
His exhortations were instrumental in inspiring terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe and in the United States. Shifting away from the airline hijackings and other mass-casualty attacks that came to define al-Qaida, al-Baghdadi and other IS leaders supported smaller-scale acts of violence that would be harder for law enforcement to prepare for and prevent.
Zaman Al Wasl
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