Iraqi security forces have neutralized a high-ranking Islamic State (IS) operative overseeing the group’s foreign activities, as announced by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. U.S. President Donald Trump later confirmed the death on Friday, stating that the terrorist’s “miserable life was terminated.” Despite Iraq’s declaration of victory over IS in 2017, remnants of the jihadist organization continue to operate clandestinely, launching occasional assaults on Iraqi military and police forces.
Sudani identified the slain leader as Abdallah Makki Muslih al-Rufayi, describing him on X as “one of the most dangerous terrorists in Iraq and the world.” Rufayi, who faced U.S. sanctions in 2023, served as IS’s governor across its Syrian and Iraqi territories and managed its foreign operations, according to the prime minister. While Sudani did not specify the timing of the operation, he praised the Iraqi intelligence team that executed it in collaboration with the U.S.-led anti-jihadist coalition.
Trump celebrated the killing on Truth Social, noting, “Today the fugitive leader of ISIS in Iraq was killed. He was relentlessly hunted down by our intrepid warfighters… in coordination with the Iraqi Government and the Kurdish Regional Government.” The U.S. Central Command shared a video on X, presumed to depict the strike, which eliminated Rufayi—identified as the global IS number-two leader—and another operative. Both were reportedly wearing un detonated suicide vests, and Rufayi’s identity was confirmed via DNA analysis.
This operation follows a similar success last October, when Baghdad reported the deaths of nine IS commanders, including Jassim al-Mazrouei Abu Abdel Qader, the group’s so-called governor of Iraq. IS infamously proclaimed a “caliphate” in 2014 after seizing swathes of Iraq and Syria, enforcing a brutal regime until its territorial defeat in Iraq by late 2017, with support from the international coalition. The group lost its final Syrian holdings in 2019. Nevertheless, IS persists, conducting attacks from Syria’s expansive desert and rural Iraqi regions.
Currently, approximately 2,500 U.S. troops remain stationed in Iraq, which now views its own forces as equipped to handle the jihadist threat independently. In late September, the U.S. and Iraq agreed to wind down the coalition’s decade-long military mission in federal Iraq within a year, extending to September 2026 in the autonomous Kurdistan region.
