22 July, 2017
"We are going after him but we assume he is alive".
"I think Baghdadi's alive. and I'll believe otherwise when we know we've killed him", Mattis told Pentagon reporters.
WASHINGTON | The american minister of Defence, James Mattis, has estimated Friday that the leader of the group islamic State (EI), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was "in life". Still, with both the USA and Russian Federation targeting him, both want to upstage the other by getting there first.
He said he has "seen nothing that would lead me to believe" that Baghdadi "has been removed from the battlefield". To define that role, is it operational? Is it spiritual? Is it physical?
"I think Baghdadi's alive..."
Russia's army said in mid-June that it was seeking to verify whether it had killed the IS chief in a May air strike in Syria. CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan has noted that he hasn't been heard from since late 2016. That mosque was destroyed by ISIS in June.
Rasmussen is at least the third high-ranking US official to push back against rumors that Baghdadi has been killed.
A top counterterrorism official said Friday the world still faces threats from Islamic State militants despite their territorial losses.
Earlier Friday, Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, told a security forum in Aspen that the intelligence community also has seen no evidence of the ISIS leader's death. He said officials still worry that a small number of skilled fighters could move out of the region and launch attacks in the West or in their homelands.
