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Senior Daesh figures break ranks with chief: Report

A file photo of Daesh terrorists in Iraq

A number of Daesh’s Iraq-based ringleaders and members have reportedly reneged on their oath of allegiance to the terror group’s chief as army troops and allied forces pushed to rid the terrorists of their last stronghold in the Arab state.  

Iraq’s al-Sumariah news network said on Sunday that the defectors had rejected to partake in bombings ordered by Ibrahim al-Samarrai, the head of the group, who is better known as Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The network cited Abu-Abdullah al-Shami, one of the group’s ringleader’s in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, as calling Baghdadi unfit to lead the outfit. 

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He said the Daesh chief had failed to retain the territories, which had been captured by the group since 2014, when it launched its campaign of bloodshed and mayhem against Iraq and Syria, the report added.

Over the past year, concerted pushes by Iraqi and Syrian forces, along with volunteer fighters, have caused the group’s major turf to dwindle to a handful of cities and towns.

The biggest concentrations of the terrorists currently lie in Mosul and Raqqah, their so-called headquarters in Iraq and Syria.

Iraqi forces have liberated half of Mosul and are in the middle of an offensive to retake the rest, while reports from Syria say Damascus is contemplating an operation to put Raqqah back under the Damascus’ command.

A security source, meanwhile, reported that Daesh terrorists, who had swarmed the border of the west-central and western Iraq provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala have been pushed from there to the outskirts of the city of Kirkuk in the neighboring province of the same name.

Daesh’s so-called governor for the Thallab Valley in Diyala, which lies to the north of the capital Baghdad, was also killed alongside those accompanying him in the explosion of a roadside bomb planted by the group itself, the network said.


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