In a recent statement on its official Twitter account, the INIS said that “the terrorist named Abdul Nasser Qardash, a former candidate to succeed (ex-Daesh chief) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been arrested.”
The statement gave no further details about the location of the arrest or whether there were others captured with him.
A security source told the Iraqi News Agency that Qardash led Daesh’s last major terror operation in Baghouz, a village in Syria’s eastern Dayr al-Zawr province, which began in February 2019.
He had reportedly served the Takfiri al-Qaeda terror group before joining Daesh and welcomed Baghdadi in Mosul, when the Iraqi city fell to the group in 2014, Press TV reported.
Qardash reportedly is an alias for one of the terror group’s founding members, Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, who was appointed as Baghdadi’s successor hours after the US claimed he had been killed.
In October 2019, US President Donald Trump announced that the US Special Operations Forces conducted an overnight raid targeting Baghdadi in northwestern Syria, during which the Daesh leader killed himself by igniting a suicide vest.
However, the US did not show Baghdadi’s remains and claimed they were dumped at sea within 24 hours of his death.
Many believe that the US created the Daesh terrorist group and helped it rise and commence its reign of terror and destruction in Syria and Iraq in 2014.
Daesh has already been driven out of all its urban bastions both in Iraq and Syria, but its remnants carry out sporadic terror attacks in both neighboring Arab countries.