Qurayshi had dark past but spent years under the radar
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi killed himself and his family after igniting a bomb at the beginning of the operation, according to a senior Pentagon official.
In Lebanon, multiple regional and local reports have indicated that the group has been recruiting scores of members from the northern city of Tripoli, one of the areas hardest hit by the country’s devastating economic crisis.
Qurayshi became a “religious scholar” with al Qaeda in Iraq, before the group rebranded itself as the Islamic State. In 2014, he “helped drive and justify the abduction, slaughter, and trafficking of the Yazidi religious minority in northwest Iraq,” the Rewards for Justice notice says.
Much of the Yazidi community lived in an area close to what some analysts believe was Qurayshi’s home town of Tal Afar in northern Iraq. In 2014, after ISIS had taken Tal Afar and Mosul, the group enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and children and murdered thousands of Yazidi men, in what the United Nations has called a genocide.
Counter-terrorism expert Daniele Raineri has noted that he was “the deputy who managed to spend the years since 2010 almost totally under the radar.” But when others in the ISIS hierarchy were taken or died in battle, he became one of the group’s leading ideologues.
In a 2018 interview with Saudi-owned al Arabiya, a senior ISIS detainee in Iraq, Ismael al Eithawi called Qurayshi “the most prominent of Baghdadi’s surrounding circle.”
A 2018 internal ISIS document repeatedly describes Qurayshi as “the deputy” to Baghdadi. He died in an operation similar to that which killed Baghdadi. And it is yet unclear if the operation will stem the group’s resurgence or if the cycle of extremist violence will continue undeterred.
ISIS has not acknowledged his death and it’s as yet unclear who may replace him. Few if any of Baghdadi’s inner circle are thought to be still at large.
