In a development that CNN is calling “unprecedented” and that another foreign correspondent is describing as potentially “the most important kill in the history of the Islamic State,” ISIS has announced that one of its senior leaders, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, has been killed in the partially rebel-held city of Aleppo, Syria. It’s not yet clear how al-Adnani died, nor have outside sources confirmed his death.
Al-Adnani was ISIS’s spokesman, but also, per New York Times ISIS expert Rukmini Callimachi and the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, a significant figure in a number of other ways:
Al-Adnani is believed to have been born in Syria in 1977.
