On Thursday, two Iraqi security officials and one Western intelligence source reported that the new leader of the Islamic State, declared on Thursday, is the brother of dead former caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In a recorded audio message posted online, the Islamic State named its new leader Abu al-Hassan al-Hashemi al-Quraishi.
The declaration comes just weeks after the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Quraishi, the man who succeeded Baghdadi as the group’s second so-called caliph in 2019. Baghdadi and Quraishi both perished by blowing themselves and family members up during US assaults on their northern Syria hideouts.
The Islamic State, a descendant of al Qaeda’s notoriously brutal Iraq branch, has its origins in an Islamist insurgency against US forces when they invaded Iraq and deposed Sunni Muslim tyrant Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The Islamic State in its current form sprang from the chaos of neighbouring Syria’s civil conflict last decade and took control wide swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014. In 2014, Baghdadi announced an Islamic caliphate from a mosque in Mosul, northern Iraq, and declared himself caliph of all Muslims.
The cruel rule of the Islamic State, which killed and executed hundreds of people in the name of its limited interpretation of Islam, came to an end in Mosul when Iraqi and multinational forces crushed the organisation there in 2017.
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