The United States announced that it is labeling the Islamic State group’s new leader a “specially designated global terrorist.”
The State Department in a Tuesday press release that Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al Mawla would receive the designation. Al Mawla has been identified as the new leader of ISIS after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was killed in October during an operation by U.S. special operations forces.
“As a result of this designation, U.S. persons will be generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with al Mawla, and al Mawla’s property and interests in property subject to U.S. jurisdiction will be blocked,” the department said.
When ISIS initially confirmed Baghdadi’s death, the terrorist group claimed the name of its new leader was Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Qurayshi. That name was one that the U.S. intelligence was not familiar with and turned out to be a new nom de guerre that al Mawla, who goes by a number of other names, was using.
The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information that can bring al Mawla to justice. Al Mawla was a “religious scholar” within ISIS’s predecessor organization, al Qaeda in Iraq.
He was born in a city in northern Iraq to an ethnic Turkmen family, and his religious rulings “helped drive and justify the abduction, slaughter, and trafficking of the Yazidi religious minority in northwest Iraq.”
In recent years, ISIS’s territorial caliphate, which once comprised large swaths of land in Iraq in Syria, has been almost entirely diminished. Despite that, ISIS has continued to threaten the U.S. and other countries and religious groups. A number of terrorist groups across the globe have pledged loyalty to ISIS, including in countries as varied as Nigeria and the Philippines.
In January, following President Trump’s proposed peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, the group announced a “new stage” in its terrorist operations and called for ISIS fighters in the Sinai Peninsula and the Levant to attack Israeli targets, which have largely avoided direct attacks from ISIS in the past.
In Tuesday’s press release, the government said it was making “significant progress” to defeat ISIS’s global footprint.
“We are taking the fight to its branches and networks around the world,” the release said. “This whole-of-government effort is destroying ISIS in its safe havens, denying its ability to recruit foreign terrorist fighters, stifling its financial resources, countering the false propaganda it disseminates over the internet and social media, and helping to stabilize liberated areas in Iraq and Syria so the displaced can return to their homes and begin to rebuild their lives.”
