Islamic State Group Confirms Leader Killed in Aleppo, Syria

The Islamic State group confirmed Tuesday in a statement that its spokesperson and prominent leader Abu Muhammad Adnani was killed in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo in Syria.

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According to the group’s Amaq News Agency, Adnani was killed "while surveying the operations to repel the military campaigns against Aleppo.” The report did not expand on the details of the Adnani’s death.

The Islamic State group controls territory in the province of Aleppo, but not in the city where Syrian rebels are fighting forces of Bashar Assad’s government.

Recent advances by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias, and by Syrian rebels backed by Turkey, have made inroads into Islamic State group holdings in Aleppo province, cutting them off from the Turkish border and supply lines along it.

Iraq said in January that Adnani had been wounded in an airstrike in the western province of Anbar and then moved to the northern city of Mosul, Islamic State’s capital in Iraq.

Adnani, a Syrian national, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group's predecessor al-Qaida more than a decade ago and was once imprisoned by U.S. forces in Iraq, according to the Brookings Institution.

He has often been the face of the Islamic State group and its chief propagandist.