The United States announced on Wednesday doubling the reward offered in exchange for any information allowing the arrest of the new leader of the Islamic State, bringing the value to ten million dollars.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Amir Muhammad Saeed Abdul Rahman Al-Mawla "helped commit and justify the kidnapping, slaughter and trafficking of members of the Yazidi religious minorities in northwestern Iraq."
And Washington put the new leader of the organization last March on its blacklist of "international terrorists."
Scarce information
And Amir al-Mawla - called Abdullah Qirdash, also known as Haji Abdullah al-Afri - is an Iraqi Turkoman, and he is from Tal Afar, west of Mosul in northern Iraq.
He has been described as the successor to al-Baghdadi since the Amaq agency (the media arm of the state organization) announced last August that al-Baghdadi nominated him "to take care of the conditions of Muslims," according to the agency's expression.
According to the American magazine Newsweek, Qirdash was an Iraqi army officer during the era of Saddam Hussein, and added that information about him is scarce.
According to an Iraqi security expert, Fadel Abu Ragheef, who had written on Twitter earlier, Qardash had been detained in Bucca prison (Basra Governorate) and previously held the position of “General Sharia” of Al Qaeda, who is a graduate of the Great Imam College in Mosul.
Abu Ragheef added that Qirdash was close to the leader Abu Alaa Al-Afri (Deputy Al-Baghdadi who was killed in 2016) and indicated that his father was an eloquent orator.
He also said that Qirdash was characterized by "cruelty, domination and militancy" and that he was the first to receive Baghdadi during the fall of Mosul.
nicknames
Al-Baghdadi was killed during the night of 26-27 October 2019 in a US military operation in Idlib Governorate, northwestern Syria. At the end of the same month, the organization officially announced the appointment of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurashi to succeed Baghdadi.
However, al-Qurashi was not known to analysts, and some even questioned his existence. Since then, many Western intelligence services have identified Amir al-Mawla as the true leader of the Islamic State.
ISIS usually uses pseudonyms for its leaders and members, to protect them from prosecution and arrest.
In 2017, Iraq declared victory over the organization, after restoring all the lands that were estimated to be about a third of the country’s area, and which the organization invaded in the summer of 2014.