Profile | Al Qurashi, the invisible leader of the Islamic State

Born in October 1976 near Mosul (a city that in 2014 became the de facto capital of IS in Iraq), with the name of Mohamed Said Abdelrahman al Maula, He was one of the ulamas of Al Qaeda in Iraq and later joined IS, rising rapidly through the ranks to become “vice-emir” and a right-hand man of Al Baghdadi.

After the death of the leader in a US operation in October 2019 in the Syrian province of Idlib, very similar to the one that ended his life this morning, Al Qurashi took the reins of one of the most feared terrorist organizations in recent decades that has subsidiaries in countries around the world.

Now there is the question of who will succeed a leader who has remained completely in the shade, while his organization has continued to operate despite having lost its territorial domains in Iraq, at the end of 2017, and in Syria, at the beginning of 2019.

A questioned leader

Since he was appointed as Al Baghdadi’s successor, Al Qurashi’s identity and biography haveThey have been a real headache for the intelligence services, starting with their origin.

Al Qurashi was born in the village of Al Mahalabiyah, in northern Iraq and inhabited by the ethnic minority of the Turkmen, lor that it led several member states of the UN Security Council to consider that his position as leader was only “temporary” because he would not have sufficient legitimacy and support among IS fighters as he was not descended from the Quraish tribe.

One of the many names with which se knew this Iraqi terrorist was Abu Omar al Turkmani (Abu Omar the Turkmen).

The Security Council itself said in one of the latest reports in which reference is made to Al Qurashi, in February 2021, that the IS leader “remains invisible, avoiding direct communication, presumably to avoid his predecessor’s fate of being tracked down and killed.”

In fact, Al Qurashi paid a very high price for this invisibility: the declining mood of IS supporters, whose operations on European territory, for example, were greatly reduced compared to the period in which Al Baghdadi led the extremist group.

According to the UN, The IS spokesman, Abu Hamza al Qurashi, is the one who has acted as “substitute for the caliph” in the media of the group’s once-powerful propaganda machine, although he has only broadcast four voice messages through the related production company, Al Furqan, since his appointment in October 2019.

10 million for his head

Al Qurashi was already a man known to US forces, who arrested him in 2008 in Iraq and took him to Camp Bucca, the largest US detention center in that country, where he was subjected to numerous interrogations.

But soon after, fHe was released under unknown circumstances and joined Al Baghdadi, who was also in that camp, to later be appointed religious leader in the province of Nineveh (north), whose capital is Mosul.

According to documents published last year by the Counter Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. Al Qurashi revealed during interrogations the whereabouts and different details about terrorists in Iraq, showing a degree of cooperation with the Americans, although he later retracted some comments, according to those reports.

in 2019, the US Treasury Department offered 5 million dollars as a reward for any information related to Al Qurashi, amount that doubled the following year and that remained in force until his death today.

This figure is due to the fact that, according to Washington, Al Qurashi helped fuel and justify the kidnapping, killing, and trafficking of ethnic minorities, such as the Yazidi in northwestern Iraq., and supervised the global operations of the jihadist group, which has always had the American enemy as its preferred objective.