A news agency linked to the Islamic State have revealed that Abu Omar al-Shishani was killed in combat in Shirqat in Iraq, he was labelled \u201cminister of war\u201d by the United States, Pentagon. The Pentagon stated that he was killed in a US air strike but only now have ISIL confirmed his death after repeated denials.<\/p>\n
Supporters of the militant group have shared messages of condolences for Shishani on social media and have vowed to launch an offensive in his honour.<\/p>\n
Baghdad-based security expert, Hisham al-Hashimi, who also advises the Iraqi Government said a source in Shirqat confirmed Shishani had been killed along with other militants.<\/p>\n
Shishani, also called Omar the Chechen, has been deemed one of America\u2019s most wanted militants under a U.S programme that offered up to $5 million for his removal on the battlefield.<\/p>\n
He was born in 1986 in Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union. Shishani developed a reputation as a close military adviser to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Supposedly Baghdadi relied strongly on him.<\/p>\n
Shishani fought military operations as a rebel in Chechnya, then joining Georgia’s military in 2006 and fighting Russian troops. He was discharged two years later according to U.S reports due to medial issues.<\/p>\n
He was arrested in 2010 for possession of weapons and spent over a year in jail, then leaving Georgia in 2012 for Istanbul and later Syria. Shishani joined Islamic State a year later and pledged loyalty to Baghdadi, he was officially identified as Islamic State’s military commander in a video shared by the group in 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A news agency linked to the Islamic State have revealed that Abu Omar al-Shishani was killed in combat in Shirqat in Iraq, he was labelled \u201cminister of war\u201d by the United States, Pentagon. The Pentagon stated that he was killed in a US air strike but only now have ISIL confirmed his death after repeated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":15822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,3,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}