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Daesh’s Baghdadi sighted in Syria

November 10, 2017 at 3:38 pm

Hezbollah media has reported that the leader of Daesh, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, has been sighted in Al-Bukamal, a Syrian town in Deir Ez-Zor, near the Iraq border.

Baghdadi was reportedly in the area while Syrian forces were clearing out the town after declaring victory over Daesh yesterday.

The US-led coalition said today that it had no “releasable information” on Al-Baghdadi’s whereabouts; however a report, carried by a military news service run by Hezbollah, said that AL-Baghdadi was present in Al-Bukamal.

Read: Observatory: Syrian army takes full control of Deir Ez-Zor from Daesh

The report did not say if Al-Baghdadi was captured in the town, which the Syrian army and its allies said they had taken this week. A Syrian army statement said that the capture of Al-Bukamal from Daesh, which was one of its last strongholds, had sealed “the fall of the terrorist Daesh organisation’s project in the region”.

While Al-Bukamal has been recaptured, pockets of resistance still pose a challenge to the Syrian military. Two days ago a Daesh blast killed more than 75 in the eastern Syria region.

The Syrian army launched its attack against Daesh in central eastern Syria in September, backed by Russian air strikes and fighting alongside Iran-backed militias and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah.

The Islamist group had held most of the city since 2014, except for one large pocket where Syrian army troops and 93,000 civilians had been holed up for three years.

Early in October the US “determined that alleged voice record belonging to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is real” which meant Daesh’s leader “lived until recently”.

Daesh had confirmed the death of its leader in July.