Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali (died 18 August 2015), also known as Abu Muslim al-Turkmani or Abu Mutaz al-Qurashi, was the second-in-command of the Islamic State and the governor of the group's territories in Iraq. He was killed in a USAF airstrike in August 2015 after previously being reported dead in November 2014.
Biography[]
Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali was born in Tal Afar, Nineveh Governorate, Iraq to a family of Sunni Muslim Turkmen. Under Saddam Hussein, al-Hayali served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Directorate of General Military Intelligence and the Special Republican Guard of Ba'athist Iraq, but after the 2003 Iraq War ended with the deposition of Saddam by the "Coalition of the Willing" led by the United States, he was decommissioned. He joined the Iraqi insurgents that fought against the US Army occupation, and he was once held at Camp Bucca. On 8 April 2013, he was made the Deputy Leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in Iraq by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his beliefs in moderate Islam became radical Islamist beliefs. On 7 November 2014 he was reported to have been killed by the United States in an airstrike during Operation Inherent Resolve, their intervention against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and some ISIS-linked Twitter accounts mourned his supposed death, although ISIS did not confirm the claims. He was later discovered to be alive, but on 18 August 2015 he was killed in an airstrike near Mosul. On 14 October 2015, the Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani confirmed his death.