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Trump Announces American Troops Have Killed Another Major ISIS Figure

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Days after U.S. special operations forces killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State terror group, President Donald Trump announced that another of the group’s top leaders has been “terminated” by U.S. troops.

The latest high-ranking terror leader to be eliminated, Trump said, might very well have succeeded al-Baghdadi as head of the organization.

“Just confirmed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s number one replacement has been terminated by American troops,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning.

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“Most likely would have taken the top spot – Now he is also Dead!” the president added.

It was not immediately clear who Trump was referring to.

However, a senior State Department official confirmed to The Wall Street Journal on Monday that the Islamic State group’s spokesman had been killed in a strike by U.S. forces in northeast Syria.

The official said that the spokesman, Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir “would have been one of the potential successors” to al-Baghdadi, but added that “it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks” before the terror group announces who its new leader will be.

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“We will see usually, eulogies come out, and then someone will emerge as the successor,” the U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal. “They’ll have religious credentials, they will have leadership credentials.”

“It will be someone from the kind of inner circle, in all likelihood.”

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces also confirmed that al-Muhajir had been eliminated.

The deaths of both leaders have “effectively disabled top ISIS leadership,” SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali told The Wall Street Journal.

According to Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics, al-Muhajir had married al-Baghdadi’s daughter.

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In announcing al-Baghdadi’s death, Trump said Sunday that the terror leader was a “coward.”

“He was a sick and depraved man, and now he’s gone,” Trump said, according to a White House transcript of his remarks.

“Baghdadi was vicious and violent, and he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying.”

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Joe Setyon was a deputy managing editor for The Western Journal who had spent his entire professional career in editing and reporting. He previously worked in Washington, D.C., as an assistant editor/reporter for Reason magazine.
Joe Setyon was deputy managing editor for The Western Journal with several years of copy editing and reporting experience. He graduated with a degree in communication studies from Grove City College, where he served as managing editor of the student-run newspaper. Joe previously worked as an assistant editor/reporter for Reason magazine, a libertarian publication in Washington, D.C., where he covered politics and wrote about government waste and abuse.
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