U.S.-led coalition airstrikes killed the latest ISIS-appointed governor of Mosul on Thursday, according to a high-ranking Iraqi police commander.
Hassan Saeed al-Jabouri, also known as Abu Taluut, was the second man appointed by the hardcore Sunni Islamist militant group to run Mosul, a major city in northern Iraq, after his predecessor, Radwan Taleb al-Hamdouni, was taken out by coalition airstrikes earlier this month.
Although the killing has not yet publicly been confirmed by U.S. security officials, al-Jabouri's death in a village 18 miles south of the city was verified to CNN by Maj. Gen. Watheq Al-Hamdani, a senior regional Iraqi police commander charged with retaking Iraq's second-largest city from the jihadists.
Mosul, a key stronghold for ISIS fighters near Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region where Kurdish peshmerga forces have been waging intense battles against ISIS, was taken from Iraqi forces earlier this year. According to the Pentagon, a strategy to retake the city will begin as early as January with Kurds attacking ISIS defenses from the west while Iraqi government forces move in from the south.
Meanwhile, six airstrikes by Syrian forces on the ISIS held city of al-Bab and the town of Qbasin in the northeast of Aleppo killed and injured more than 100 people this week, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which collects information from activists and health care workers.
On Tuesday, 30 ISIS militants were killed in the village of Abo Qassayed after Syrian Kurdish forces captured the ISIS-held town, International Business Times reported.
On Wednesday, a Jordanian fighter pilot was captured after his plane crashed over Raqqa. "Evidence clearly indicates" that the terrorist group "did not down the aircraft," U.S. Central Command said in a statement.
As of Dec.23, coalition airstrikes in neighboring Syria have killed at least 1,046 mostly non-Syrian ISIS militants, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
