Isis leader believed to have fled coup attempt by his own fighters

Exclusive: jihadist group placed bounty on head of foreign fighter after plot, say intelligence officials

Martin Chulov in Hasakah, Syria
Thu 7 Feb 2019 18.40 GMT

The Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, survived a coup attempt last month launched by foreign fighters in his eastern Syrian hideout, intelligence officials believe, and the terrorist group has since placed a bounty on the main plotter’s head.

The incident is believed to have taken place on 10 January in a village near Hajin in the Euphrates River valley, where the jihadist group is clinging to its last sliver of land. Regional intelligence officials say a planned move against Baghdadi led to a firefight between foreign fighters and the fugitive terrorist chief’s bodyguards, who spirited him away to the nearby deserts.

Isis has offered a reward to whomever kills Abu Muath al-Jazairi, believed to be a veteran foreign fighter, one of an estimated 500 Isis fighters thought to remain in the area. While Isis did not directly accuse Jazairi, placing a bounty on the head of one of its senior members is an unusual move and intelligence officials believe he was the central plotter.

“They got wind of it just in time,” an intelligence official said. “There was a clash and two people were killed. This was the foreign fighter element, some of his most trusted people.”

Iraqi officials and their counterparts in Britain and the US are confident that Baghdadi has recently spent time in the final redoubt of the so-called caliphate, where the group’s diehard members have regrouped after two years of battlefield losses for what has widely been billed as a last stand.

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