ISIS Leader 'Omar the Chechen' Believed Killed by Airstrike

[Geee]

PJ Media:

A top ISIS commander known by his nickname Omar the Chechen — and recognized by his distinguishable red beard — is believed dead from a U.S. airstrike in Syria, a senior defense official told NBC News Tuesday.

The likely death of Omar al-Shishani near the town of Shaddadi — seized by Syrian rebels from ISIS last month — would be a key gain for coalition forces in taking out one of the biggest names on the U.S.'s terror hit list.

The senior defense official said al-Shishani, born in 1986, is believed to have died along with a dozen other ISIS fighters in the airstrike Friday.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook added that al-Shishani — originally named Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili — was a Syrian-based Georgian national who held top ranks within ISIS, including minister of war.

[Valin]

@Geee

Related

The Forgotten Front Against ISIS
Noah Rothman
Mar. 8, 2016

On Tuesday, the Western world was privy to a promising dispatch from the frontlines of the war against the Islamic State. Though it had not yet been confirmed, the U.S. military and sources within the intelligence community believed that a top ISIS commander, Omar “the Chechen” al-Shishani, had been killed last Friday in a coalition airstrike in Syria. This is the latest victory in the American military campaign of attrition against the Islamic State. In Iraq in February, the U.S. Army’s Delta Force inaugurated a counterinsurgency operation aimed at neutralizing ISIS targets, establishing informant networks and supply lines, setting up safe houses, and coordinating combat operations with ingenious Kurdish fighters. These are important operations against ISIS, but they are mere pinpricks for an organization that still controls thousands of square miles of territory and a number of major urban centers. The next president will inherit the campaign against ISIS. Given the urgency of that mission, the gravity of the questions that have not yet been asked of the candidates vying to succeed Barack Obama as the executor of that campaign remain staggering.

(Snip)

And what of that vaunted regional Sunni ground force that is supposed to do all of America’s fighting for it? This was President Barack Obama’s contribution to the war effort, but his pan-Arab coalition of anti-ISIS governments fizzled. Fielding a Sunni-dominated ground force is a pipe dream transparently designed to placate Americans who want to see ISIS defeated but desperately hope to avoid the commitment of U.S. troops to that effort. Only in the immediate wake of the ISIS-directed Paris attacks did American lawmakers begin to talk openly and earnestly about the necessity of U.S. combat troops if the goal is to truly “degrade and destroy” ISIS. That earnestness soon faded along with the memory of those attacks, and it will likely take more Western bloodshed to revive it.

 

It takes a special kind of innocence to contend honestly that this election cycle has been one characterized by seriousness and resolve commensurate with the scope of the challenges facing the country. It is remarkable, though, that these issues have not been addressed by any of the remaining presidential candidates in a satisfactory fashion.

 

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Cliffnotes version: This War Will Remain On Hold For the next 4 Years.

 

IMO there is only one Presidential candidate who even comes close to taking this seriously......and he should probably drop out, to keep the thin skinned clueless blowhard from sitting in the Oval Office.