ISIS Announces Abu Hafs As New Leader, Abu Hussein Killed by HTS or Turkish Intelligence?

ISIS illustration. (Wikimedia Commons/aharan_kotogo)

JAKARTA - The ISIS group on Thursday announced the death of Abu Hussein Al Husseini Al Quraishi, as well as announcing the name of the group's new leader.

“(Abu Hussein) was killed after direct clashes with the Sunni group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) in Idlib Province, said a spokesman for Daesh in a message recorded on his channel on the messaging app Telegram, without specifying when he was killed,citing Arab News, August 4.

The spokesperson later announced the group's new or fifth leader would be Abu Hafs Al Hashimi Al Qurashi.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced last April that the leader of ISIS had been killed in Syria in an operation carried out by the Turkish intelligence agency MIT.

"The suspected leader of Daesh (ISIS), codenamed Abu Hussein Al Qurashi, has been neutralized in an operation carried out yesterday by MIT in Syria," President Erdogan told broadcaster TRT Turk at the time, citing The National News.

President Erdoğan said MIT has been following Al Qurashi for a long time.

Previously, ISIS announced that their leader Abu Hasan Al Hashimi Al Quraishi was killed in November last year.

While his predecessor, Abu Ibrahim Al-Qurashi, was killed in February last year in a US strike in Idlib province.

The first leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, was killed, also in Idlib, in October 2019.

After a remarkable rise in Iraq and Syria in 2014 that saw it conquer large swaths of territory, ISIS saw its self-proclaimed "caliphate" collapse under the waves of attacks.

The group was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later. However, spy cells are still carrying out attacks in the two countries.