CIJA Issues Press Release on Slain Islamic State Leader
The United States of America confirmed the death of the leader of Islamic State terrorist organisation (‘IS’) Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi AKA “Hajji Abdullah” today, 3 February 2022, at approximately 00H00 local Syrian time.
The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) conducted investigations into atrocities authored by Hajji Abdullah, whose real name is Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla, since 2015. Evidence amassed by the non-governmental organisation through investigations on the ground in Syria and Iraq showed his potential criminal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and other offences such as human trafficking.
Hajji Abdullah, who had a bounty of up to USD $10 million on his head for information leading to his capture, was a high-ranking IS member who succeeded Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the Caliph of IS following the latter’s death during a US military operation in October 2019.
Prior to that, Hajji Abdullah was a member of the IS Delegated Committee, the group’s senior executive body. A trove of evidence gathered by the non-governmental organisation CIJA over a number of years shows how he served as IS’s senior judge and Sharia law official in Iraq from 2014, exercising religious authority over all IS activity across that country. By April 2015, he was widely known as a deputy to Al-Baghdadi. He was designated by both the United Nations and the United States of America as a wanted terrorist for his role.
According to Nerma Jelacic, Deputy Director of CIJA, “Hajji Abdullah had enormous power to persecute and punish IS’s enemies as far back as 2014. Not only was he one of the key architects of the Islamic State slave trade in Yazidi women and children, he personally enslaved and raped captive women.”
CIJA believes it had gathered sufficient evidence to accuse Hajji Abdullah of genocide, extermination, slavery, rape, gender-based persecution, and a host of other crimes. As a Delegated Committee member and one of the group’s senior ideologues, Hajji Abdullah was responsible for all Yazidi prisoners held in Iraq after they had been captured during IS’s Sinjar military operation in August 2014. In this capacity, he oversaw the distribution of Yazidi women, together with young children, to IS members as sabaya (female spoils of war). Moreover, he was responsible for forced conversions of those it considered to be infidels to Islam and the massacre of hundreds of Yazidi men and boys.
Believed to be of Turkmen origins, Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla was an Iraqi national born in October 1976. Hajji Abdullah was a religious scholar in IS’s former incarnations, Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Islamic State in Iraq, during the 2000s and was detained between 2008 and 2011 at Camp Bucca. He was thought to have been wounded in an airstrike, resulting in the amputation of his leg by late 2014.
Notes to Editors:
The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation dedicated to furthering criminal justice efforts through investigations, in order to prevent the loss and destruction of vital evidence for the purpose of supporting prosecutorial efforts to end impunity, whether at the domestic or international level.
To date, CIJA has:
Completed 24 structural investigations and legal briefs identifying dozens of high-ranking Syrian Regime and Islamic State suspects;
Secured over 1,000,000 pages of documents generated by the parties within the Syrian regime and the Islamic State;
Interviewed over 3,000 witnesses including defectors, individuals with direct knowledge of perpetrating parties and their structures as well as victims.
CIJA is apolitical and carries out its investigative activities independently of any government. CIJA currently works to support prosecutions in 13 countries and assists 37 law enforcement and counter-terrorism organisations globally.