But scarcely a week before his death, he oversaw one the group’s biggest raids since he took charge. Last month, IS fighters carried out an audacious attack on a Syrian prison holding thousands of the group’s supporters and a nighttime raid on an Iraqi military base that killed 11 soldiers.
The prison raid lasted for 10 days and led to the death of 77 prison staff, four civilians, and 374 prisoners and IS fighters. The operation was a propaganda coup for the jihadists.
Online, pro-IS accounts sprung up across social media channels in numbers not seen in years, sharing videos in support of the group.
Islamic scholar
While IS gave his nom de guerre as Qurayshi – signifying descendence from the prophet Muhammad – he was born Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla in 1976 to an Iraqi Turkmen family in Nineveh province.
The youngest son of a muezzin whose two wives gave him seven sons and nine daughters, Qurayshi studied Sharia law at the University of Mosul before serving as an army officer in the Baath regime under Saddam Hussein.
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Qurayshi joined Al-Qaeda, serving as an Islamic scholar and issuing religious rulings for the group.
He was first detained by the Americans in 2004 and held at Camp Bucca prison where he met the future IS leader Baghdadi.
When he was released is not clear, but according to declassified documents he was detained again in 2008 when he was a leader of Islamic State of Iraq, an Al Qaeda successor that eventually became IS.
US officials later claimed that he served as a willing informant while he was detained. “He did a number of things to save his own neck,” one US official said.
