UPDATE 2000 GMT: A Pentagon spokesman has pushed back on the report of the wounding of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Colonel Steve Warren repeated to reporters that al-Baghdadi had not been a target of a March 18 raid, “We said [in March] that there was nothing to indicate that Baghdadi had been wounded or killed. There’s nothing to indicate that there’s been a change.”
The Guardian reports from sources in Iraq that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was seriously wounded by a US airstrike in the west of the country in late March.
The “source in Iraq with connections” to the Islamic State said that the injuries were life-threatening, but that al-Baghdadi has made a slow recovery. However, al-Baghdadi, who declared himself a caliph last July, has not resumed day-to-day control, with Islamic State military and shura councils exercising more authority.
A “western diplomat and an Iraqi adviser” each confirmed that the US airstrike occurred March 18 in al-Baaj in Nineveh Province, close to the Syrian border. The attack on a three-car convoy killed three local Islamic State leaders, but US officials did not know that Baghdadi was in one of the cars.
Baghdadi is said to have spent most of his time in al-Baaj, about 200 miles west of the Islamic State center of Mosul because — according to a source — “the Americans did not have much cover there…. It was the one part of Iraq that they hadn’t mapped out.”
Baghdadi was also hit when US jets attacked a two-car convoy on the outskirts of Mosul on December 14. The raid killed his close aide Auf Abdul Rahman al-Efery, but Baghdadi’s vehicle was not hit.
Baghdadi’s deputy, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, and the head of the group’s military operations in Iraq were both killed in early December by an airstrike.
