Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, announced late Sunday that Turkish forces had killed the commander of the Islamic State organization during an operation in Syria.
In an interview with TRT Turk, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that a hit on Saturday killed the IS leader, also known by the codename Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi.
Erdogan claimed that MIT, the Turkish intelligence service, has kept tabs on him “for a long time.”
Erdogan stated in the interview, “We will keep up our fight against terrorist organizations without making any distinctions against them.
The MIT and IS militants engaged in combat late on Friday night on a farm in the Aleppo provincial village of Miska, according to a member of the military police of the Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces who spoke to The Associated Press.
Al-Qurayshi, who was sheltering in a structure on the farm, detonated himself as the combat got more intense. Investigators were looking through the hiding place for information and possible evidence.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition war monitor, Turkish drones also hovered over the area.
After Ankara put the highways leading to the battles on high alert, Turkish-backed Syrian opposition organizations cut them off.
The IS group did not immediately confirm it.
Turkey has carried out numerous operations against IS and Kurdish groups along the Syrian border, seizing or killing suspected militants.
Following a series of land incursions to drive Kurdish groups away from the Turkish-Syrian border, the nation now controls large swaths of northern Syria.
After the militant group’s previous leader was assassinated in October, Abu Hussein al-Qurayshi was named the new leader.
An IS spokesman called him “one of the veteran warriors and one of the loyal sons of the Islamic State.”
He assumed charge of IS at a time when the terrorist group had already lost control of the regions it had controlled in Syria and Iraq.
Nevertheless, he had been trying to resurrect, with sleeper cells waging deadly attacks in the two countries.
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