Eliminated in Syria | Al-Mawla will have been the emir of the Islamic State group for two years

(Paris) Nicknamed “the professor” or the “destroyer”, the leader of the Islamic State (IS) group whose death Joe Biden announced on Thursday, was relatively unknown, but knew how to keep the group’s strategy and activity under his control. reign of about two years.

Amir Mohammed Said Abdel Rahman al-Mawla, a jihadist with multiple aliases who called himself “the Emir” Abu Ibrahim al-Hachimi al-Qurachi at the head of IS, was killed during an operation by American special forces Thursday in Syria, announced the American president.

Before taking over the leadership of the terrorist nebula, following the elimination of his predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the end of 2019, he had presided over the massacre of the Kurdophone minority of Yazidis.

The trail that led to this man of Turkmen origin, probably born in 1976, seemed uncertain in an organization whose leaders had all previously been Arabs.

This former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, a graduate of the University of Islamic Sciences in Mosul, joined the ranks of Al-Qaeda after the American invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, according to the American NGO Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

“Liquidation of the Yazidi minority”

He was imprisoned in 2004 in the American prison of Camp Bucca (southern Iraq), considered the nursery of jihadism in the Levant, where he met Baghdadi. Released for unknown reasons, he worked alongside his fellow prisoner, who in 2010 took control of the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda before successively creating the Islamic State in Iraq, then the Islamic State in Iraq. and in Syria (Daesh in Arabic).

According to the CEP, “Mawla rose quickly within the upper ranks of the insurgency, and was nicknamed ‘the professor’ and the ‘destructor'”, acquiring a reputation as a brutal man, in particular through the elimination of opponents of the emir within EI.

His hometown of Tal Afar, 70 kilometers west of Mosul, sees the proliferation of explosive workshops and plans for attacks. “Abou Omar the Turkmen” had played “a major role in the jihadist campaign to liquidate the Yazidi minority through massacres, expulsion and sexual slavery”, underlined in 2020 Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor at Sciences-Po Paris , specialist in jihadism.

At the head of the group, without any public appearance, he will have tried to restore its vigor and activity despite the loss of the territory that the IS had occupied straddling Iraq and Syria during the existence of its “caliphate”. (2014-2019).

EIK and Africa

“The United States has responded with force and precision to the defiance it deems unbearable of the recent bloodbath in Hassakeh prison,” Filiu told AFP on Thursday, referring to the January attack on Israel. a facility in northeast Syria where many ISIS jihadists were locked up. “Mawla was a genuine operational leader, whose elimination risks hampering, at least temporarily, the rise in power of the jihadist organization”.

Under his reign, “he nevertheless worked to bring the EIK back to the fore (for EI in Khorassan, in Afghanistan, editor’s note) long before the Taliban came to power”, notes Damien Ferré, director of the company Djihad Analytics, specialized in the analysis of global and cyber jihad.

Since then, the EIK has become the main threat to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, striking Kabul airport during the August 2021 US withdrawal and maintaining a constant danger for the Islamist power in Kabul.

Several researchers also point to the activity of IS in the Lake Chad region, in particular by integrating part of the workforce of the Boko Haram sect, as well as in Central Africa.

“IS picked up the colors in 2020 before declining both in the quality and in the quantity of attacks over the past year,” adds Damien Ferré, even if the organization continues to be active in the Iraqi zone. -Syrian, as the attack on the prison has shown again.

Experts note that IS is still preparing the succession of its leaders. But no information was available on Thursday on the person who could succeed Mawla at the head of a group which, like its great rival al-Qaeda, has always survived the death of its leaders.

“It’s obviously a major setback” for the IS, explains to AFP Hans-Jakob Schindler, former United Nations expert who became director of the CEP.

“Of course they are going to have to find a new leader and to come up with a name at this stage would be pure speculation. […]. But the mistake would be to believe that everything is over, or that things are better, after this elimination and given the low number of attacks in Europe and the United States” recently.