Daesh commander alive with no injuries, report says
News of the death of a senior commander of the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group in a US airstrike in Syria is rejected, a report says.
Abu Omar al-Shishani “had not been exposed to any injury,” the Daesh-affiliated Amaq news agency quoted an unidentified source as saying on Tuesday.
Last week, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said a US airstrike targeted Shishani on March 4 near Syria’s northeastern town of Shaddadah.
The red-bearded ethnic Chechen had been sent to Shaddadah to revive Daesh militants following a series of strategic defeats, Cook added.
Backed by Russia's airstrikes, Syrian forces have recently managed to retake key areas from militants and deal heavy blows to them across the country.
On Tuesday, US Army Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman for the US-led coalition purportedly fighting against Daesh, said the alliance was able to "assess that he (Shishani) is dead" and that it "got the word Monday morning."
Meanwhile, Rami Abdurrahman, with the Britain-based so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said after Shishani was hurt, Daesh "brought a number of doctors to treat him, but they were not able to." The Daesh commander died in a hospital in the eastern suburbs of the Syrian city of Raqqah, Abdurrahman added.
In addition, an unnamed Iraqi intelligence official said Shishani was buried in Dayr al-Zawr on Tuesday.
Shishani, whose real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili, was born in 1986 in Georgia, which was then part of the Soviet Union.
He has a reputation as a close military adviser to the so-called Daesh leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
He earlier served as the terrorist group's military commander for the territory it controls in Syria, but later became the commander of Daesh ground forces, according to reports.
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