ISIS ‘war minister’ likely dead in US strike

A long-range Qadr ballistic missile is launched from a location in the Alborz mountain range in northern Iran on Wednesday. — AFP

An ISIS commander described by the Pentagon as the group’s “minister of war” was likely killed in a US airstrike in Syria, US officials said on Tuesday, in what would be a major victory in the United States’ efforts to strike the militant group’s leadership.

Abu Omar al-Shishani, also known as Omar the Chechen, ranked among America’s most wanted militants under a US programme that offered up to $5 million for information to help remove him from the battlefield.

Born in 1986 in Georgia, which was then still part of the Soviet Union, the red-bearded Shishani had a reputation as a close military adviser to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was said by followers to have relied heavily on Shishani.

The strike itself involved multiple waves of manned and unmanned aircraft, targeting Shishani near the town of al-Shadadi in Syria, a US official said. The Pentagon believes Shishani was sent there to bolster ISIS troops after they suffered a series of setbacks at the hands of US-backed forces from the Syrian Arab Coalition, which captured al-Shadadi from the militants in February.

Meanwhile, General Lloyd Austin, the head of the US military’s Central Command, asked for permission to resurrect an effort to train Syrian Opposition fighters for battles against ISIS militants, but on a smaller scale than a previous programme that failed and was scrapped in 2015.

General Austin told a Senate hearing on Tuesday that unlike the previous effort, which sought to recruit and train entire units of fighters outside the country to redeploy into Syria, the new programme would focus on shorter-term training of smaller groups.

US secretary of state John Kerry and his French, German, British and Italian counterparts will meet on Sunday in Paris to discuss the Syrian crisis ahead of planned peace talks in Geneva, French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said.

The five diplomats will examine the status of the ceasefire in effect since February 27 and “if everything is going forward as we hope... encourage the Opposition to return to the negotiating table,” he said in Cairo on Wednesday.