BAGHDAD — Omar al-Shishani, a top Islamic State commander who was a magnet for fighters from the former Soviet Union, has died of wounds suffered in a U.S. airstrike in Syria, a senior Iraqi intelligence official and the head of a Syrian activist group said Tuesday.
Al-Shishani, who was wounded in a U.S. airstrike earlier this month, died Monday evening outside the Islamic State group’s main stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, the two told The Associated Press. A U.S. military spokesman confirmed the reports.
The Islamic State-affiliated Aamaq news agency cited an unnamed source as denying that al-Shishani was wounded or killed, without providing any evidence that he was still alive.
The red-bearded al-Shishani, who was in his 30s, was one of the most prominent Islamic State commanders, appearing in several online videos leading fighters into battle. He served as the top commander in Syria before being appointed to lead three elite units that carried out special missions in Syria and Iraq, according to Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar who closely follows the group.
Al-Shishani, whose real name was Tarkhan Batirashvili, was born in the Pankisi Valley, a predominantly ethnic Chechen region within the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
He did military service in the Georgian army but was discharged after an unspecified illness, a former neighbor told The Associated Press in 2014. Georgian police later arrested him for illegal possession of arms, the neighbor said. Upon his release in 2010, Batirashvili left for Turkey.
He first surfaced in Syria in 2013 with his nom de guerre, which means “Omar the Chechen” in Arabic, leading an al-Qaida-inspired group called “The Army of Emigrants and Partisans,” which included a large number of fighters from the former Soviet Union.
Some 1,500 battle-hardened fighters from the Caucasus region joined Islamic State because of al-Shishani, al-Hashimi said.
He first showed his battlefield prowess in August 2013, when his fighters proved pivotal in taking the Syrian military’s Managh air base in the north of the country.
In a video released in the summer of 2014, after Islamic State swept across northern and western Iraq and declared an Islamic caliphate, al-Shishani stood next to the group’s spokesman and other fighters as they declared the elimination of the border between Iraq and Syria.
A U.S. airstrike targeted al-Shishani on March 4 near Syria’s eastern town of Shaddadeh, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said last week. Al-Shishani had been sent there to bolster Islamic State fighters “following a series of strategic defeats,” Cook said in the statement.
