Maybe?
The Whitehouse and Pentagon have announced the latest emir of daesh is dead.
In a covert op launched yesterday, Spec Ops troops, supported by attack helos, Reaper drones and fast movers, surrounded a building where Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was supposed to be holed up. US troops used loudspeakers to try to get al-Qurayshi to surrender and a gun battle ensued according to the Pentagon. At some point, al-Qurayshi suicided himself by detonating a homicide vest, killing several suspected members of his family. There were no US casualties reported.
According to sources I trust, the Kurdish-led SDF provided intel and staging for the operation, which occurred in close proximity to both a HTS (Hayat Tahrihr al Sham, an al Qaida offshoot) and Turkish checkpoints in the town of Atmeh, in rebel held Idlib province Syria.
Are we sure it’s al Qurayshi? Pretty sure. Are we sure he was the actual leader of daesh? Well, that’s where it gets a bit murky. As with most jihadist groups, daesh isn’t very centralized. While al Qurayshi claimed the title of emir, it’s unclear how much day to day control he had over the group.
You’ll notice there was a UH-60m lost on the raid. It wasn’t shot down, it suffered a mechanical failure and was destroyed on the ground by US aircraft after all sensitive electronics were removed.
So, what does it mean? In practical terms very little. As I said above, it is unclear how much daesh was under the control of the now corpse. Even if he was fully in charge of day to day operations, his lieutenants will take over, just as he was supposed to have done after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated himself back in 2019 under similar circumstances.
Frankly, this has more than a whiff of the Hologram trying to buff out the dents in his image after the Kabul debacle. See, I am tough, forget about that thing back a few months ago.