Within days of the elimination of the first caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a US raid in Syria in October 2019, the group named Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurashi its new caliph.
About:
On February 3, 2022, US forces claimed the elimination of al-Qurashi in a similar raid in Syria.
Last week, confirming the death of al-Qurashi, ISIS named one Abu al-Hasan al-Hashemi al-Qurashi as its third Caliph.
Reports suggest he is older brother of al-Baghdadi, and a key member of the shura or consultative assembly.
The trajectory of the group since the loss of the so-called caliphate and its first two caliphs, suggests that ISIS core based in Iraq and Syria continues to pose formidable risks to the region and the world at large.
Background
In December 2011, the US withdrew its troops from Iraq, claiming that Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), led by Al-Baghdadi, had been decimated. By then, AQI’s Syrian branch, Al Nusrah Front (ANF), led by Abu Muhammad al-Julani, had already sent scores of cadres to Syria and grabbed territory.
By April 2013, the AQI had morphed into ISIS — and on June 29, 2014, it declared a caliphate across large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
However, Julani declared that ANF would remain a branch of al-Qaeda, and later renamed it Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which still controls northwestern Syria and some other parts of the country.
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