Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, spokesman of the Islamic State, was reportedly killed in a raid by U.S. special forces in northwest Syria a day after fugitive Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died in a separate U.S. attack, The New York Times reports.
Al-Muhajir, who was considered al-Baghdadi’s likely successor, was promoted to be ISIS’ spokesman in 2016 after Abu Mohammed al-Adnani was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Aleppo. The CIA targeted him one day after a raid targeted al-Baghdadi in the Idlib province of Syria.
Al-Muhajir was killed in Ayn al-Bayda, near Jarablus in Aleppo province.
Baghdadi killed himself during the raid by detonating a suicide vest after fleeing into a dead-end tunnel, President Donald Trump said Sunday in a televised address from the White House.
ISIS has been in disarray and has no declared successor as leader yet.
Mazlum Abdi, the head of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Fighters (SDF), wrote on Twitter that al-Muhajir had been killed in an operation coordinated between his forces and the United States.