Military strikes take out three of the terrorist group’s key figures
Three top al-Qaeda leaders have been killed over the past few days in Iraq. In an early-morning raid on Sunday, American and Iraqi special forces directed an air strike against a house in Saddam Hussein’s former hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, killing Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who headed the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization consisting of several Sunni insurgent groups. On Tuesday, an Iraqi military spokesman announced that Ahmed al-Obeidi died in an operation in the northern province of Nineveh. Al-Obeidi directed al-Qaeda operations in three of Iraq’s northern provinces.