A coalition air strike killed militant Islamic State (IS) group’s finance chief in Iraq last month, the United States military said Thursday, hailing it as another scalp in its bid to blow apart the extremists’ financial network.
Abu Saleh was killed in late November, US military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said in a video conference from Baghdad, calling him “one of the most senior and experienced members” of the group’s nefarious financial system.
“Abu Saleh was the third member of the finance network that we have killed” recently, Warren added, likening him to a finance minister for the extremist group, which grabbed swathes of Iraq and Syria in a brutal offensive of beheadings and forced religious conversions.
Abu Saleh was killed along with two associates as part of the US-led coalition’s campaign to destroy the extremists’ financial infrastructure, Brett McGurk, Washington’s envoy for the anti-IS fight, said on Twitter.
Real name Muwaffaq Mustafa Muhammad al-Karmush, the US State Department’s terrorist blacklist describes him as a 42-year-old Iraqi.
“Killing him and his predecessors exhausts the knowledge and talent needed to coordinate funding within the organisation,” Warren said, adding that two other henchmen in IS fundraising networks also were killed in coalition air strikes in Iraq in late November.
