New leader of ISIS led genocide against Yazidis

The new leader of ISIS has been named as a former member of al-Qa’ida in Iraq who led the slaughter of thousands of Yazidis.

The new leader of the Islamic State terror group is Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi.

The new leader of Islamic State has been named as a former member of al-Qa’ida in Iraq who led the torture and slaughter of thousands of Yazidis.

Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli, a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, was put on the official blacklist of terrorists by the US government — with a $US5m ($9.1m) reward offered for information leading to his capture.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Mawli had been made leader of Islamic State in late October, days after a raid by American commandos resulted in the death of the group’s self-styled “caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Mawli, who studied Islamic law at the University of Mosul, became one of the founding members of Islamic State after meeting Baghdadi in a US-run detention facility in 2004, and was nicknamed the “Professor” by fellow jihadists.

Mr Pompeo said Mawli “was previously active in al-Qa’ida in Iraq and was known for torturing Yazidi religious minorities”, referring to one of ISIS’s most barbaric campaigns in 2014.

-Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a video released last April. Picture: AFP

An estimated 5000 Yazidis were killed and hundreds of women and girls captured, enslaved and raped as militants rampaged across the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in what the UN has described as genocide. Mawli is said to have led the persecutions and later produced Islamic edicts that tried to justify the massacre.

Although US President Don­­ald Trump and others claimed Islamic State had been “100 per cent defeated” with the loss of its former territory in 2017 that once stretched over Syria and Iraq, thousands of militant jihadists are thought to have gone into hiding in remote or ungoverned parts of Iraq and Syria.

Last week, Islamic State released a video claiming responsibility for attacks in Kirkuk province that have killed dozens of Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians.

Mawli was named a specially designated global terrorist, putting him on a list created after the September 11, 2001, attacks that makes any support to him a crime in the US.

“We’ve destroyed the caliphate and we remain committed to ISIS’s enduring defeat no matter who they designate as their leader,” Mr Pompeo said.

Mawli, who was born into an Iraqi Turkmen family in the town of Tal Afar, is thought to be one of the few non-Arabs among the Islamic State leadership, and goes by the pseudonym “Haji Abdullah”, accord­ing to monitoring groups.

Having served in the Iraqi military, he joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam in 2003, the multi-national Counter Extremism Project said.

A year later, he was captured by US forces and jailed at Camp Bucca, near the Iraq-Kuwait border, where he met and formed a bond with Baghdadi and other al-Qa’ida militants who would go on to found ­Islamic State.

His whereabouts are unknown but it has been suggested he followed Baghdadi to Idlib, northern Syria, the last rebel-held province in that country, where the terrorist leader died.

The Times