Thursday, March 28, 2024

Baghdad

Hoax: ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dies in Golan Heights Israeli hospital

 Hoax: ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dies in Golan Heights Israeli hospital

The leader of the ISIS group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

The leader of the ISIS group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. File photo.

(IraqiNews.com) Dozens of Indian news media outlets published a rumor that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died yesterday in an Israeli hospital following serious injuries that he had sustained in a coalition air strike that occurred last month. These news reports cited an unverified Radio Iran broadcast that supposedly aired earlier today.

IraqiNews.com reached a Radio Iran spokesperson who denied that their network had broadcast news of al-Baghdadi’s death. Claims of Radio Iran’s supposed broadcast were picked up by dozens of prominent Indian news agencies such as the Times of India, Yahoo News India, The Indian Express and Zee News.

There have been several similar reports about Baghdadi’s death in the recent months, and none of them turned out to be true.

Despite these rumors, however, the UK news agency, ‘The Guardian,’ reported last week that two officials – a western diplomat and an Iraqi adviser – confirmed a strike took place on March 18 in the al-Baaj a district of Nineveh, close to the Syrian border, which severely injured ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The US Pentagon, however, denied that al-Baghdadi had been hit or targeted in that air strike.

“Yes, he was wounded in al-Baaj near the village of Umm al-Rous on 18 March with a group that was with him,” Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi official who advises Iraq on ISIS, was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

‘The Guardian’ reported that al-Baghdadi has made a slow recovery since then and that he, however, has not resumed day-to-day control of the organisation.

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