French newspaper Libération gained access to the DGSI file (and quotes other sources) about Abu Loqman, one of the most important figures of the Islamic State. Wali of Raqqa (until the liberation) and allegedly killed in Hajin in April 2018
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Here the key points. Abu Loqman was wounded in the same targeted airstrike north of Aleppo that killed Abu Muhammad al Adnani in August 2016 – I find hard to process this big piece of info. They were touring together the frontline near al Bab
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One week later a targeted airstrike killed Abu Muhammad al Furqan. We still don’t understand what happened in 2016. It was like a dozen of Abbottabad operations compressed in one year. The doers don’t talk about them because it’s not over yet
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Abu Loqman is appointed head of Amniyat, the intelligence of the Islamic State, in March 2017. and "one month later he is in Libya for a brief time to reorganize the Islamic State there"
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You may remember the Islamic State in Libya in complete disarray after the loss of Sirte in December 2016 (a prolonged siege) and the carpet bombing against the remaining forces hidden in a desert camp in January 2018. Three months later they rose their heads again
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After the visit of Abu Loqman, Islamic State suicide bombers targeted the offices of Libya’s electoral commission in Tripoli on May 2, 2018 – “one of the most brazen assaults on the Libyan capital in years”
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If you ask me the route of Abu Loqman to get from Raqqa to Libya, I don’t know. I just remember that Italian intelligence tracked down one of the top leaders in Libya, Moez Fezzani, in Khartoum, capital of Sudan, few months before in November 2016
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The French DGSI does not confirm the death of Abu Loqman in Hajin in April 2018. By the way his kunya now would be Abu Ayyoub al Ansari – his name as chief of Amniyat – in case someone of the Islamic State posts an eulogy
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In case you miss pieces of the stuff I’m tweeting, don’t worry. Kyle Orton will take them from here and will use them on his site without attribution to put some meat on his dissertations.
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Kyle jumps on the source and then writes the same things – after. Never an original contribution. Last week I talked about a new batch of Islamic State biographies and he started “updating” his site with the same things
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By the way, those bios were circulating since months. I started the conversation about them because someone put the bios in a public pdf and I felt it was about time
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I deliberately left out an important point about Abu Yahya al Iraqi: that if he was Wali of Idlib then he wasn’t in a cell in Abu Ghraib in July 2013, as rumors said. I don't speak = mistake still on that site. Maybe for the next “original update”
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I’m not the only one talking about this. I started noticing this behaviour when I wrote about the Absi brothers, years ago. Sometimes I know this kind of stuff because I spend time in places
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