IS leader killed while attempting to escape via Tigris River
An Iraqi special forces soldier fires at a drone operated by Islamic State militants Islamic State militants in Mosul, March 2017. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
Mosul (IraqiNews.com) Watheq al-Hamadani, Nineveh police chief, told Shafaaq News on Monday that the Nineveh police has killed Sallam Ghanem Abdullah Sultan, a leader in the Islamic State (IS).
Sultan was killed while he was attempting to cross the western side of the Tigris River at Yarimja region, in southeast of Mosul.
The Iraqi forces had started the campaign to restore the City of Mosul on 17 October, backed by the US-led international coalition against the terror group in Iraq and Syria, with about 100,000 fighters from the Iraqi forces, Peshmerga and al-Hashd al-Shaabi.
On Sunday, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, arrived in Mosul, where he met with security leaders and offered congratulations for their victory over Islamic State.
State TV aired scenes of the prime minister’s arrival at the Nineveh Operations Command in the city in preparation for a press conference.
The long-awaited victory in Mosul brought an eight-month campaign, backed by a U.S.-led coalition and paramilitary forces, to an end. It also means an effective collapse of the Islamic State’s self-styled “caliphate” declared from the Old City’s Grand Nuri al-Kabeer mosque by the group’s supreme leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2014.