US may have killed ISIS’ global leader Abdulqadir Mumin in Somalia airstrike in May, report says
The United States may have killed ISIS’s global leader in a Somalia strike last month, according to a report.
Abdulqadir Mumin was the target of a May 31 airstrike conducted on an area roughly 50 miles southeast of Bosaso, Somalia, a city on the Gulf of Aden in the country’s northeast, on the three US officials told NBC News.
Three ISIS terrorists were killed during the attack, US Africa Command said at the time, but the officials said they have yet to determine whether Mumin was among those eliminated in the operation.
Mumin was publicly identified by the US as the head of ISIS’s Somalia affiliate, but two U.S. officials told the outlet he quietly ascended as the terrorist group’s global leader last year. His predecessor, Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, was killed in battle in Syria in November 2022.
ISIS has just 100 to 200 militants in Somalia, all located in the north, a senior official said, but there are other small ISIS groups spread through Africa, including in Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique.
The terror group still has thousands of terrorists globally, with the majority concentrated in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.
