No. 2 Leader of ISIS Killed in U.S.-Led Airstrike, Iraq Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/world/middleeast/isis-iraq.html

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BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government said Wednesday that the second-in-command of the Islamic State had been killed in an airstrike carried out by the American-led coalition in northern Iraq, a claim American officials said they could not confirm.

Iraq’s Ministry of Defense said that the militant leader, known as Abu Alaa al-Afari, was killed in a strike near the northern city Tal Afar. The United States Central Command acknowledged that airstrikes were conducted against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, near Tal Afar on Tuesday and Wednesday, but it could not verify the government’s claim.

In a statement on its website, the Defense Ministry said that, “based on accurate intelligence,” a coalition airstrike had targeted Mr. Afari and several other leaders who had gathered in a mosque. Iraqi state television broadcast an aerial video of a building being blown up that it said showed the strike that had killed Mr. Afari.

But it was unclear from the video whether the building was a mosque, and a spokesman for Central Command, Maj. Curtis J. Kellogg, denied that the airstrikes had been conducted against any mosque.

In Washington, a senior Defense Department official said that no coalition airstrikes were specifically targeting Mr. Afari. “We were not targeting ISIS’ No. 2 guy,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified targeting information. “If we got lucky, then I guess we’ll see.”

The death of Mr. Afari would represent a serious blow to the leadership of the Islamic State. But Iraqi officials have frequently made claims about the deaths of terrorist leaders that later turned out to be untrue.

A previous leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to the Islamic State, was claimed to have been killed several times, and his supposed death became a running joke in the Iraqi media. The death of another well-known Islamic State militant, an Iraqi named Shaker Waheeb, has on several occasions been reported by Iraqi officials, and each time he has emerged alive.

Mr. Afari, who also goes by several other assumed names, was recently added to a United States government list offering rewards for information leading to the death or capture of Islamic State leaders. The list, which identified Mr. Afari as Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli and said he had been a top deputy to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, offered a $7 million bounty for Mr. Afari.

Mr. Afari is said to be the deputy to the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who himself has been the subject of rumors that he was wounded in an airstrike in March. On Wednesday, Gen. Tahseen Ibrahim, the spokesman for Iraq’s Ministry of Defense, said that the best intelligence he had seen suggested that Mr. Baghdadi had, indeed, been wounded, but was still in charge of the organization.