ISIS chief injury unconfirmed

The US and Iraqi officials fighting ISIS said on Friday they could not confirm a report by an Iraqi TV channel that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been wounded in an airstrike in northern Iraq.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition fighting the radical Islamist militants, Colonel Chris Garver, said in an email that he had seen the reports but had “nothing to confirm this at this time”.

Kurdish and Arab security officials in northern Iraq said they also could not confirm the report.

Al Sumariya TV cited a local source in the northern province of Nineveh saying that Baghdadi and other ISIS leaders were wounded on Thursday in a coalition airstrike on one of the group’s command headquarters close to the Syrian border.

The channel has good connections with Shia politicians and Iraqi forces engaged in the battle against the ISIS.

There have been several reports in the past that Baghdadi, whose real name is Ibrahim al-Samarrai, was killed or wounded after proclaiming himself caliph of all Muslims two years ago.

The ultra-hardline Sunni group is under increased pressure in both Iraq and Syria, and the territory under its control has shrunk significantly since 2014.

In related development, US treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing Daniel Glaser told Congress that efforts to choke off the finances of the ISIS, including bombing attacks on ISIS cash stores and oil shipments, locking it out of the banking system, and cutting off the Iraq government cash flows to ISIS-controlled areas, have left it unable to pay its fighters and spurred corruption within the group.

“As a result of these efforts, ISIS is struggling to pay its fighters and we have seen a number of ISIS fighters leaving the battlefield as their pay and benefits have been cut and delayed,” he said.But he added that Gulf states need to do more using domestic laws to freeze funds and assets of suspect groups and individuals.

Experts in France said that the group is gradually losing ground in Syria and Iraq with growing numbers of Western jihadists deserting the ISIS group to return to countries like France, where security services are trying to sort genuine repenters from terror suspects.

The Islamic State is also battling to prevent some of the thousands of foreign volunteers who have joined its ranks since 2014 giving up the fight and going home.

The U.S. earlier this year announced an intensification of the war on Islamic State with more airstrikes and more American troops on the ground to advise and assist allied forces.

The U.S.-led coalition has regularly flown raids out of Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, in operations aimed at killing and capturing Islamic State leaders.

A Kurdish intelligence official and an Arab from the Baaj area west of Mosul said the U.S.-led coalition had conducted such a raid there earlier this week. The coalition did not confirm this raid.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces are positioned in an arc around the north and east of Mosul while the Iraqi army is trying to capture Falluja, the group’s stronghold near Baghdad.

The Iraqi army is also massing tanks and troops south of Mosul, in preparation for an offensive planned later this year to retake the largest city under the control of the militants.

In Syria, Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian government forces and U.S.-backed Syrian opposition and Kurds are separately trying to advance on Raqqa, the group’s capital in Syria.