Baghdad [Iraq], March 15 : The Iraqi Prime Minister said that personnel of the country's national intelligence service, working with coalition forces commanded by the United States, had killed the head of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as reported by CNN.
"The Iraqis continue their impressive victories over the forces of darkness and terrorism," Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said in a statement posted on X.
Abdallah Maki Mosleh al-Rifai, or "Abu Khadija," was "deputy caliph" of the militant group and "one of the most dangerous terrorists in Iraq and the world," the statement said, as reported by CNN.
On his Truth Social platform Friday night, US President Donald Trump said, "Today the fugitive leader of ISIS in Iraq was killed. He was relentlessly hunted down by our intrepid warfighters" in coordination with the Iraqi government and the Kurdish regional government.
"PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!" Trump added.
As per a report by CNN, a security official said the operation was executed by airstrike in the western Iraqi province of Anbar. According to a second official, al-Rifai's death was verified on Friday, but the operation happened Thursday night. They were not permitted to make public comments, so they talked on condition of anonymity.
The announcement came on the same day as the first visit by Syria's top diplomat to Iraq, during which the two countries pledged to work together to combat IS.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Fouad Hussein, as reported by CNN, said at a news conference that "there are common challenges facing Syrian and Iraqi society, and especially the terrorists of IS." He said the officials had spoken "in detail about the movements of ISIS, whether on the Syrian-Iraqi border, inside Syria or inside Iraq" during the visit.
Hussein further referred to an operations room formed by Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon at a recent meeting in Amman to confront IS and said it would soon begin work.
The relationship between Iraq and Syria is somewhat fraught after the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Al-Sudani came to power with the support of a coalition of Iran-backed factions, and Tehran was a major backer of Assad.
The current interim president of Syria, Ahmad al-Sharaa, was earlier reportedly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani and fought as an al-Qaida militant in Iraq after the US invasion of 2003 and later fought against Assad's government in Syria.
The US and Iraq had announced an agreement last year to wind down the military mission in Iraq of an American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group by September 2025, with US forces departing some bases where they have stationed troops during a two-decade-long military presence in the country.
Iraqi political officials declared that the threat posed by IS was under control and that they no longer required assistance from Washington to defeat the residual cells after the coalition's mission in Iraq was agreed to terminate.
But the fall of Assad in December led some to reassess that stance, including members of the Coordination Framework, a coalition of mainly Shiite, Iran-allied political parties that brought current Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani to power in late 2022, according to a CNN report.
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