Turkish forces have killed the leader of the Islamic State group in an operation in Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said late Sunday.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview with Turkish TV station TRT that his IS leader, codenamed Abu Hussein Al-Quraisi, was killed in a strike on Saturday.
Erdogan said Turkish intelligence agency MIT had been tracking him for a long time.
A member of the military police of the Turkish-backed Syrian rebel army told the Associated Press that late Friday night at a farm in the village of Miska, Aleppo province, MIT clashed with IS fighters.
Turkey has conducted numerous operations against ISIS and Kurdish groups along the Syrian border, arresting or killing suspected militants. The country controls vast territories in northern Syria after a series of land invasions to force Kurdish groups off the Turkish-Syrian border.
Abu Hussein Al-Quraishi was appointed leader of the militant group after its former leader was killed in October. An IS spokesman called him one of his experienced warriors and one of his loyal sons of IS.
He assumed leadership of ISIS when the militant group lost control of territory it once held in Iraq and Syria.
Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in mid-October during a Syrian rebel operation in southern Syria’s Daraa province.
His successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, was killed in a similar attack in February 2022.
The Islamic State group broke away from Al Qaeda about a decade ago and eventually took control of northern and eastern Syria and much of northern and western Iraq.
Syrian militants, backed by S., seized the last land once held by militants in eastern Syria’s Deir el-Zour province, which borders Iraq.