ISIS names new leader and confirms death of terror group’s former boss in audio clip

ISIS today named its new leader after confirming the death of the terrorist group’s former boss in an audio clip.

The jihadist group’s ex- leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi blew himself and his family up last month during a bloody raid by US special forces.

US President Joe Biden branded it “a final act of desperate cowardness” and said the terrorist blew up “that third floor rather than face justice for the crimes he has committed”.

He added: “[al-Qurayshi] took several members of his family with him. This horrible terrorist leader is no more.”

ISIS has now confirmed al-Qurashi’s death and named his successor as Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.

The group’s spokesman, Abu Omar al-Muhajer, said the late ISIS chief has chosen him as the next caliph in an audio message.

Thirteen people are believed to have died, including six kids and four women, during the daring raid on the former boss, which involved 24 elite Special-Ops backed by fighter jets and helicopter gunships.

“At the beginning of the operation, the terrorist target exploded a bomb that killed him and members of his own family, including women and children,” a senior administration official told Reuters at the time.

Residents described continuous gunfire and explosions that jolted Atmeh near the Turkish border, an area dotted with camps for internally displaced from Syrias civil war.

Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi was the terrorist group’s leader since 2019, after taking over from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Baghdadi was killed when US forces stormed his compound in northwestern Syria and he blew up self-up with a suicide vest after being cornered in a tunnel.

Al-Qurashi, also known as Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla, among other aliases, was a senior terrorist leader in ISIS’s predecessor organisation, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and steadily rose through the ranks to become deputy leader, according to .

He spearheaded the campaign to abduct, rape, and slaughter thousands of Yazidis in northwest Iraq and was on the US State Department’s most wanted list since March 2020.

The operation to kill him – which residents say lasted more than two hours – took place in Atmeh, a village near the border with Turkey that is home to thousands of Syrian refugees.