Turkish authorities on Sunday said they had arrested a top ISIS commander and close aide of the terror group’s former leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a military raid conducted last week in Istanbul.
According to police and Turkey’s intelligence agency, the unnamed Afghan man assisted al-Baghdadi in hiding in Syria’s Idlib province, where the caliphate’s leader was eventually killed by United States special forces in October 2019.
He also is suspected of training ISIS soldiers in Syria and Iraq, as well as serving on its decision-making council. Ankara has in recent years waged an unrelenting war in neighboring Syria and inside Turkey itself against the remnants of the largely collapsed radical Sunni terror organization, which at one time controlled large swaths of Iraq and Syria.