Top advisor to Daesh ringleader killed in Mosul

The Iraqi air force has killed a top advisor to Daesh’s ringleader and second-in-command to the terror group’s shadow governor for Mosul, as part of large-scale military operations to liberate the strategic northern city.

Iraqi state television reported on Sunday that Mi-35M helicopters carried out a series of air raids on the town of Tal Kayf (aka Tel Keppe), located some eight miles from Mosul in Nineveh Province, leaving the key Daesh member, named as Abu Usama, dead.

The attack also killed a number of Abu Usama’s henchmen, the report added.

Mosul fell to Daesh in 2014, when the terror group started ravaging the country, naming the city as its so-called headquarters in Iraq.

Over the past months, Daesh has lost much of the Iraqi territory it had seized, with Mosul currently serving as its last stronghold in the country.

Earlier in the month, Arabic-language Iraqi Media News Agency (WAA) reported that Ibrahim al-Samarrai, otherwise known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Daesh’s chief himself, had been poisoned together with three other commanders of the Takfiri terrorist group, in the Be’aaj district, located in the southwest of Nineveh Province, of which Mosul is the capital.

Also on Saturday, the Iraqi police said 36 Daesh terrorists, most of whom hailing from Chechnya, had been killed in the province’s al-Shourah district.

ME