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Since the announcement of his appointment, days after Abu Bakr al Baghdad was liquidated, the new leader of the self-styled Islamic State had sheltered under a name of war . The true identity of Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Qurayshi is Amir Mohamed Abdelrahman al Mawli al Salbi, two intelligence agencies cited on Monday by the British newspaper The Guardian have revealed on the basis of information provided by spies infiltrated in the jihadist organization.

"The information does not come as a surprise. It is the same person who receives the names of Al Hajj Abdalá and Abdalá Qardash. In internal documents of the IS [Islamic State, for its acronym in English], Al Hajj Abdalá was repeatedly identified as the number two of Al Bagdadi and was pointed out by one of the leaders of the IS arrested as his most likely successor, "Ayman el Tamimi, a renowned expert in the group that makes a five-year period, managed to control vast areas of Syria and Iraq.

The IS announced the heir of Al Bagdadi on October 31 in a message signed by Al Furqan, the media arm of the organization dedicated to spreading messages from its dome . The statement confirmed the death of Al Bagdadi five days earlier in a US special forces operation in a Syrian town bordering Turkey and that of his then spokesman, Abu Hasan al Muhajir, on a parallel mission and advanced the names of his successors, safeguarding its identity to avoid new blows to its structure.

The new "emir al Muminín" (leader of the believers, in Arabic) is an old acquaintance of regional and western intelligence services . Graduated in "sharia" (Islamic legislation) by the University of Mosul, he was born in Tal Afar, a city located about 70 kilometers west of Mosul. A member of the Turkmen minority, he is one of the few non-Arab members of the IS elite.

The biography available so far considered him a former officer of the army of Saddam Hussein who in 2003, after the US invasion of the country and the dismantling of the Iraqi armed forces, inaugurated - like so many others - his journey towards radicalism. The IS leader today met Al Bagdadi at Camp Bucca, a detention center in southern Iraq established and administered by US troops after his arrest in 2004.

It was there that "Professor Abdullah" was seduced by the ideology of Al Bagdadi. Always loyal to what would become the leader of the organization in 2010, the new face of terror is one of the most veteran ideologues of the group , responsible - for example - for plotting the religious justification for the genocide of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq . In the summer of 2014, thousands of Yazidi women were kidnapped and turned into sex slaves while thousands of other men were murdered in cold blood and thrown into mass graves whose body identification and recovery work has not yet been completed.

Al Salbi, a founding member of the organization, was appointed by the council of the Shura, the body of the IS where the main military and religious affairs are settled, hours after the death of Al Bagdadi. To date, the US Treasury offered a five million dollar reward for information that could lead to his arrest.

Intelligence sources believe that, instead of accompanying Al Bagdadi to the Syrian province of Idlib, his heir is hidden in the west of Mosul, sheltered from the sleeping cells that remain in the towns surrounding the city.

Precisely last Thursday the Iraqi security forces announced the detention of the considered mufti of the IS, Shifa al Nima, the religious leader who dictated the fetuses (Islamic edicts) ordering the execution of clerics and academics who refused to join the IS; the fight against the Iraqi army or the destruction of monuments like the mosque of the prophet Yunus in the city. The leader, arrested in a district of Mosul, was transferred to a detention center in a truck because he cannot walk and weighs 254 kilos .

Since its rise, Al Sabi has tried to reorganize the scaffolding of an organization that, emerging from Al Qaeda in Iraq, managed to expand beyond the borders of Syria and Iraq , where it built a caliphate that came to have a surface similar to that of United Kingdom and finished collapsing last March after the loss of the last fief in Syria.

The resurgence of the IS worries the Iraqi security forces. Tanned in the insurgency, the movement no longer controls territory but has increased its actions in recent months , with the placement of improvised explosive devices, selective killings and ambushes of Iraqi troops in the provinces of Saladin, Kirkuk and Nineveh. In Syria, the thumping of war and extremism incubated in the camps of Al Hol and Al Roj - where relatives of group members live - also contribute to the rebirth of the last hosts.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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