Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is probably still alive and likely hiding in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, a senior US general<\/p>\n
Elusive Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is probably still alive and likely hiding in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, a senior US general said Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re looking for him every day. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s dead,\u201d Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, commander of the counter-IS coalition in Iraq and Syria, told reporters in a conference call.<\/p>\n
Townsend admitted he didn\u2019t \u201chave a clue\u201d where Baghdad is precisely, but believes he may have fled with many other IS soldiers into the Middle Euphrates region stretching from Syria to Iraq, after coalition and local force assaults on the IS bastions of Mosul, Raqa and Tal Afar.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe last stand of ISIS will be in the Middle Euphrates River Valley,\u201d Townsend said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we find him, I think we\u2019ll just try to kill him first. It\u2019s probably not worth all the trouble to try and capture him.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a $25 million US bounty on his head, Iraq-born Baghdadi has successfully avoided an intense effort to seek him out for six years or more.<\/p>\n
Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a longtime conflict monitor, said in mid-June that it had heard from senior IS leaders in Syria\u2019s Deir Ezzor province that Baghdadi was dead.<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s army said in mid-June that it was seeking to verify whether it had killed him in a May air strike in Syria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is probably still alive and likely hiding in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, a senior US general Elusive Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is probably still alive and likely hiding in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, a senior US general said Thursday. \u201cWe\u2019re looking for him every day. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3433,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3434,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432\/revisions\/3434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}