Global IS leader attacked and possibly killed in US airstrike

The U.S. military targeted the global leader of ISIS in Somalia with an airstrike late last month but cannot confirm whether he was killed, three U.S. officials say.

The U.S. government has publicly identified Abdulqadir Mumin as the leader of ISIS’s Somali affiliate, but two U.S. officials say he quietly became the terrorist group’s global leader last year.

The U.S. Africa Command issued a statement on May 31 saying it had conducted an airstrike against ISIS fighters in a remote area 50 miles southeast of Bosaso, Somalia, killing three fighters. However, AFRICOM’s statement did not mention who the U.S. targeted or who was killed. AFRICOM reported that no civilians were killed in the strike.

Three US officials now say Mumin was the target of this operation, although they have no confirmation of his death.

A senior administration official confirmed that the US had flown a strike on a high-value ISIS target in Somalia, but he declined to name the person and said the US was still working to confirm the result.

A senior defense official says IS is relatively small in Somalia, with only 100 to 200 fighters, all based in northern Somalia, but there are other small IS groups in parts of Africa, including Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.

According to US intelligence, ISIS still has thousands of fighters around the world, especially in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria.

But because the U.S. has successfully targeted ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria, ISIS leaders see Africa as “a place where they should invest, where they can be more permissive and operate better and more freely, and they want to expand the ISIS cell there. So they brought the Caliph to that region,” the senior defense official said. The cells in Africa have expanded because of the strategic leadership of ISIS leadership, the official added.

The official said ISIS fighters in Somalia are in some ways more effective than other terrorist networks operating in the country, including evading the FBI and Interpol and sharing tactics, techniques and procedures, such as funding.

The US accuses Mumin of being responsible for deadly attacks across Somalia over the past decade, including the killing of a judicial official in his home in 2019 and the capture and months-long occupation of a town in the Puntland region in 2016.

In 2016, the United States declared him a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” on the grounds that he posed a significant risk of committing terrorist acts that threatened the safety of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.

That Mumin has now taken command of IS was not widely known, two US officials say. He succeeded Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, who was killed in combat in Syria in late 2022. IS’s two previous global leaders, including its most prominent leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had committed suicide when cornered in US military strikes.