BAGHDAD — Iraqi officials said Sunday that the head of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was wounded in an airstrike in western Anbar province.
Pentagon officials said they had no immediate information on such an attack or on the militant leader being injured.
Iraq’s Defense and Interior ministries both issued statements saying al-Baghdadi had been wounded, without elaborating, and the news was broadcast on state-run television Sunday night.
Al-Baghdadi, thought to be in his early 40s, has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Since taking the reins of the group in 2010, he has transformed it from a local branch of al-Qaeda into an independent transnational military force.
He has positioned himself as perhaps the pre-eminent figure in the global jihadi community. His forces have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq, killed thousands of people, beheaded Westerners and drawn the U.S. troops and warplanes back into the region, where Washington is leading a campaign of airstrikes by a multinational coalition.
An Interior Ministry intelligence official said that al-Baghdadi was wounded in an Iraqi airstrike during a meeting Saturday with militants in the town of Qaim. The official cited informants within the militant group. A senior Iraqi military official said he learned in operational meetings that al-Baghdadi had been wounded.
The operation was carried out by Iraqi security forces, both officials said, although they did not know how seriously al-Baghdadi was hurt. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential material.
A statement posted Sunday on the official Facebook page of Defense Minister Khalid Obeidi also said al-Baghdadi was wounded but added that he was targeted in the northern city of Mosul, currently the group’s biggest stronghold in Iraq.
A senior U.S. defense official said Saturday that the coalition conducted airstrikes targeting a gathering of Islamic State leaders near Mosul, but he could not confirm whether al-Baghdadi was part of the gathering.
When asked about the Iraqi reports, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said Sunday: “We have no information to corroborate reports that ISIL leader al-Baghdadi has been injured.”
Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said some Islamic State militants wounded in the airstrike near Qaim were taken across the frontier to the Syrian border town of Boukamal. There was no indication that al-Baghdadi was among those brought to Boukamal.
