Pentagon sceptical about reports of

  16 June 2016    Read: 786
Pentagon sceptical about reports of
Pentagon officials said yesterday they were
“We have seen these types of reports before, here in Iraq and in other operations, and until we have confirmation, we are going to practise healthy scepticism,” Colonel Christopher C. Garver, a US military spokesman in Baghdad, told Fox News.

Similar claims have emerged in the past only for officials to debunk them later.

“We’ve seen the reports and are looking into them,” White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price added.

The Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak on Tuesday quoted the ISIS-linked news agency al-Amaq is reporting the airstrike killed Baghdadi in Raqqa on Sunday. However, The Indepedent in London reported that the text attributed to Amaq had been faked.

Iraq security forces reported at the weekend that Baghdadi and fellow ISIS leaders were wounded in an airstrike while travelling in convoy about 65km from the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Baghdadi was last sighted in February talking to children at a mosque in the city of Fallujah, now under siege by Iraqi forces. That had been the first sighting of the ISIS leader in 18 months.

Baghdadi had declared himself the leader of Islamic State in 2014. His wellbeing has often been the subject of speculation. Last October, it was reported he had been seriously wounded in an Iraqi airstrike on his convoy. Two months later he released a 24-minute recording in which he claimed that his organisation was “thriving”.

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