Islamic State says leader’s son killed in Syria by Russian forces

The Islamic State terror group said that the son of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed fighting Syrian government forces.

By: World Israel News Staff and AP

ISIS’s social media outlets announced Tuesday that that the son of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in fighting in Syria.

The announcements included a picture of a young boy carrying a rifle and identified him as Huthaifa al-Badri.

Meanwhile, other media sources reported, based on Iraqi intelligence, that Russian forces were responsible for killing him in a missile attack on a Syrian cave in which he was hiding.

Iraq’s Falcon intelligence cell said Russian forces on Monday fired three missiles at a cave in Homs that held 30 “terrorist leaders” and several of Badri’s bodyguards.

It said 11 people were killed in the attack.

The statement on social media dated this month, said he was an elite fighter, known as an “inghimasi,” who was killed while fighting Syrian and Russian troops at a power station in the central Homs province. It did not specify when he was killed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group, said the most recent IS operations in the area were in the first two weeks of June.

Al-Baghdadi has been reported killed or wounded on a number of occasions but is widely believed to still be alive. Little is known about al-Baghdadi’s family, but a woman and a child who were said to be his wife and daughter were detained in Lebanon in 2014.

IS has been driven from nearly all the territory it once controlled in Syria and Iraq, though it still maintains a presence in the Syrian desert and remote areas along the Syria-Iraq border.