US special forces capture prominent ISIS leader
In the Iraqi province of Kirkuk, US Special Forces captured one of the leaders of the so-called Islamic State, Abu Omar Ash-Shishani. American commandos caught Ash-Shishani and two field commanders and killed 7 militants during a special operation in the Riyadh region of the Kirkuk province. The three terrorists were reportedly brought to the city of Sulaymaniyah in Northeastern Iraq.
International Coalition Forces have waged a continuous campaign against the so-called Islamic State with intensified efforts. On December 27th, International Coalition Forces led by the US carried out 33 airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria.
Almost a month before that, on December 3rd, the Coalition under the auspices of the US carried out 26 airstrikes on Islamic State oil infrastructure targets in Syria in order to support the Iraqi Army in liberation of Ramadi.
It was reported that the US military has been providing assistance to armed groups of the Kurdish Peshmerga in operations aimed at liberating Sinjar from militants of the Islamic State. In particular, US soldiers identified targets and requested airstrikes.
Reports of Ash-Shishani’s death have repeatedly appeared in the media but each time the reports were disproved. On the 13th of November 2014, for example, the Head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, claimed on his Instagram page that the terrorist had died. Four days later this information was disproved.
In October 2014, Ash-Shishani threatened to invade Russia. In a conversation with his father, he promised that he would return.
Abu Omar Ash-Shishani was born as Tarkhan Batirashvili in 1986 in one of the villages of Pankisi Gorge in Georgia in what was then the Soviet Union. He served in the Georgian Army but was later convicted of illegal storage of weapons. In 2012, he went to Turkey and fought in Syria and Iraq. Afterwards, he became one of the field commanders of the so-called Islamic State.
The Coalition of 65 countries, led by the USA, has carried out bombings on the territory of Iraq since August of 2014 and supports the Kurdish forces fighting in Iraq. On December 2, 2015, the Prime Minister of Iraq, Haider Al-Abadi, supported sending US Special Forces to fight Islamic State militants in Iraq.