The leader of the Islamic State group, whose death was announced by US President Joe Biden on Thursday, had taken refuge in the “pocket of Idlib”, in Syria, which has become a sanctuary for jihadists, and which escapes Bashar’s control. Al-Assad.
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US President Joe Biden announced on Thursday February 3 the death of the emir of the Islamic State group, Abu Ibrahim Al-Hachimi Al-Kourachi, in a locality on the Turkish border in northwestern Syria, in what is known as calls “the pocket of Idlib”, which has become a sanctuary for jihadists.
The Idlib region is indeed beyond the control of Bashar Al-Assad and is today a landmark for jihadists. The area is controlled by the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, the powerful group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham. There are also small groups there, as well as Daesh fighters, as the US special forces operation against the leader of the Islamic State group has just shown.
In this cul-de-sac where hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees are piled up, the Turkish intelligence services have their eyes and ears on the spot and know exactly what is going on there. The jihadists also go back and forth to Turkey to seek treatment or rest. The men of the Islamic State group are also very active in the region located at the other end of Syria, in the northeast on the Iraqi border.
The recent attack on the Hassaké prison, where thousands of jihadists are detained, showed that Daesh was far from having been completely eradicated. Scattered across the desert and isolated villages, its fighters have once again proven capable of carrying out sophisticated large-scale raids.
Is the death of the leader of the Islamic State group a blow for the jihadists? A successor to Abu Ibrahim Al-Hachimi Al-Qurachi will no doubt take over in the coming weeks. You should know that the groups of fighters, who live in hiding, have great autonomy on the ground and will continue to launch attacks and harass all those they consider their enemies…
If the leaders of the Islamic State group have disappeared, like the pseudo caliph Abu Baker Al Baghdadi in 2019 or his successor today, the extremist ideology of the Islamic State group continues to thrive on the aftermath of the war in Syria and in Iraq. Worse: like a spreading cancer, terrorist metastases have proliferated from the Middle East to Afghanistan and Africa, new fronts of jihad. Holy war is globalizing.