Killed during an operation carried out by the United States in the early hours of Thursday (3), Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, leader of the Islamic State (IS), had assumed command of the fundamentalist group in October 2019, shortly after his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to be assassinated, also in Syria.
Before commanding IS, however, Quraishi served as an informant for the US government when he was held in a penitentiary in Iraq. He was described as a model and cooperative prisoner in classified reports and provided detailed instructions on the extremist group’s embryo, some of which led to the death of terrorists, according to The Washington Post.
More than 53 reports on the subject reveal that Quraishi’s cooperation involved, for example, helping with sketch portraits of Iraqi IS leaders and identifying restaurants and cafes they liked to frequent. He even shared information from his personal phone book, a black notebook seized when he was captured, with terrorist numbers and records of each one’s pay. The last interrogation was reportedly carried out in 2008, and Quraishi reportedly failed to cooperate after having his reward expectations dashed.
It took a few months for the history of his involvement in terrorism to be discovered by intelligence services and made public when Quraishi became the leader of IS. That’s because his real name, Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, has not been released by the terrorist group.
Quraishi was considered one of the most influential ideologues among the faction’s ranks, according to the British newspaper The Guardian at the time he took charge of the group. From an Iraqi-Turkish family and born in the Iraqi town of Tal Afar, he was one of the few non-Arabs in the upper echelons of IS.
Known to intelligence officers as “Salbi”—from his real name, not his war one—he rose through the ranks based on his background as an Islamic scholar and contributed to the foundations of the enslavement and genocide carried out against the Yazidi minority in the Iraq.
The now former leader graduated in Islamic law from the University of Mosul, the second largest in Iraq, an institution that plunged into a period of darkness when the city was occupied for more than two years by IS. The site was kept under a regime of persecution, with the curriculum and its ethical principles being reworked to suit the ideology of the terrorist group.
In 2004, Quraishi was detained by US troops at the Iraqi prison at Camp Bucca, where he met his predecessor, Baghdadi. Before his death, the US State Department placed a $5 million bounty on Quraishi’s head and two other members of the group’s hierarchy. He had already been touted as a possible replacement for Baghdadi.
The name given to him by IS when he took over — Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi — has great significance, according to the BBC at the time of the change of command. The Quraishi surname is associated with that of families that claim to be descendants of Muhammad, something essential for a man to be considered a “caliph”.
The terrorist faction, at the time, described the new leader as an erudite, well-known fighter and “war emir”, who would have fought against American forces and, therefore, would have known how to fight them.
Source: Folha
