Dheyaa Alwakeel
On September 16th 2016, the American Defense Ministry declared the death of (Abu Mohammed Furqan) – identified by it as the Multimedia Ministry of ISIS – in an air strike by an unmanned aerial vehicle at al-Raqqah, Syria. Giving to the article’s importance among the assassination of several level one leaders in the extremist organization, we try to cover this major event and its possible fallouts in this primary analysis:
Who is Abu Mohammed Furqan..??
A leader in ISIS whom was kept in the shadow and the information about is very little. Despite his so called names: (Wael Adel Salman al-Fayad, Dr. Wael …etc), Abu Mohammed Furqan had no presence in the media or the field, and even that the organization has no posted photo, no a visual activity, and no audio record at its website. All of that makes his mystic character more of a puzzle rather than a possibility on the security aspect or reality, and push it in-between the intelligence conflict game among ISIS and foreign Intelligence.
Is Abu Mohammed Furqan the multimedia minister or not?
After the death of Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani – the multimedia and advertising officer on August 30th 2016 by an American raid over Al-Bab district in Aleppo, ISIS admitted his death. But there was no announcement of assigning a successor to Al-Adnani. This action raises an important question, how did the CIA called Abu Mohammed Furqan the ISIS’s Multimedia minister?
And here we will give an analytic answer for that question:
The CIA built its conclusion on information from sources assigned to monitor Furqan on the field. Also there might had been an electronic hacking of several connections, although ISIS’s use of a coding techniques. Based on the previous he was targeted and killed. The sure thing is that an important leader of ISIS was killed in the raid. But until now it’s not possible – on the security or informatics aspects – to determine whether he was Furqan or someone else, as ISIS didn’t declare his death and that’s important as it is the other side of the equation. Also there are no evidences pointing to his death like a body photo which even if it appear, confirming it can’t be made as, in the first place, there are no old nor recent photos of the so called Abu Mohammed Furqan that can be used for matching, and that complicates the scene more. Another disturbance was made: Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi claiming –through Twitter – the death of Abu Mohammed Furqan, adding to the previous that ISIS’s high level officers don’t wonder off alone on their motorcycles, which was mentioned in the Pentagon’s statement. We stand now in front of a riddle with many possibilities that challenges the international and regional intelligence agencies which seek the truth of ISIS’s commander’s structure and who are the effecting leaders in the ISIS’s military and ideological decision.
Who is the potential successor for Al-Adnani and Al-Furqan?
There are two competing over succeeding Al-Adnani and Al-Furqan in the multimedia aspect that ISIS depends upon a lot. They are:
- Tuerky Al-Banali also named Abu Sufyan. He is 31 years old, and has joined ISIS on 2013. He was in a position called “Sharie Al-Khilafa” till May 2016 when he was thrown away because of his Islamic opinion (Fatwa) in which he forbade fighting and Al-Nusra as they are –in his opinion – on the brotherhood platform. He is also the one with the outrageous Fatwa that authorized raping the Yazidi women. Al-Banali has been a lot in the lights via records on Youtube, Dabiq magazine, and several other websites, and has an extremist provocative speech. In the meanwhile, he is described as the godfather of the organization which is a description only called on Assem Muhammad Tahir al-Barqawi –also named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi.
(Tuerky Al-Banali also named Abu Sufyan). - Ali Ben Mousa Al-Shawakh called Abu Luqman, whose death was declared several times but tunes out to still being alive and has appeared several times on ISIS’s media.
(Ali Ben Mousa Al-Shawakh, also called Abu Luqman)
From our point of view, ISIS will probably go with Tuerky Al-Banali for the multimedia, as it needs an extremist personality with a media interaction with its audience, supporters, and the ones moved by its deceiving methods.
Conclusion:
I believe that ISIS will continue ignoring that incident and will not give any information confirming or denying Abu Mohammed Furqan’s death, especially not after the killing of many important leaders like Abu Ali al-Anbari, Abu Omar al-Shishani, and Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, which revealed how fragile and weak its security is that it couldn’t protect its leaders. Adding its field defeat, all of that indicate the beginning of the fall and recession of that fake structure and its deadly idea. And that is an absolute near fact.
*Former advisor and official speaker of the Commander-in-chief of the Iraqi Defense Ministry.
