A top ISIS leader and spokesman has been killed, according to the terrorist group’s news agency.
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was reportedly killed near the city of Aleppo, Syria, where Russian and Syrian government forces have been conducting a bombing campaign.
ISIS’s news agency Amaq did not say how the 39-year-old Syria native was killed in a eulogy published Monday, only that he was “surveying operations” in the area.
Adnani was designated as a global terrorist and called the terrorist group’s “official spokesman” by the U.S. State Department in 2014, and a $5 million reward for information on him was offered by the U.S. in 2015.
His real name is Taha Sobhi Falaha, and he is thought to have been one of the first foreign fighters against American troops in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.
The Iraqi military said in January that Adnani had been wounded in an airstrike, though he seemed to reappear in an audio address to ISIS supporters this spring where he called for attacks on Western countries during the month of Ramadan.
