IS militant linked to Charlie Hebdo attack could still be alive: Iraq

An IS militant linked to the deadly 2015 attack on French weekly Charlie Hebdo could be still be alive, the Iraqi military said on Saturday.

Boubaker El Hakim was reported by American defence officials to have been killed in November, in a U.S. drone strike in Raqqa, IS's de facto capital in Syria. 

Iraqi intelligence supplied information to the Syrian air force to carry out a series of strikes on IS headquarters and hideouts in Syria, including one believed to belong to El Hakim, an Iraqi military statement said.

Aircraft from Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's air force targeted several locations in Raqqa and Albu Kamal, near the Iraqi border, said the statement, without indicating the location of El Hakim's headquarters or the date of the raids.

An Iraqi military spokesman told Reuters El Hakim's headquarters were destroyed but it wasn't clear if he was killed.

In 2015 Iraq and Syria established a joint committee with Russia and Iran, Assad's main foreign backers, to share intelligence about IS.

El Hakim was believed to have been involved in planning the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, a weekly known for its satirical covers ridiculing political and religious leaders.

Two militants broke into an editorial meeting of the weekly, raking it with bullets, killing 17 people. Another militant later killed a policewoman and took hostages at a supermarket, killing four before police shot him dead.

IS declared a "caliphate" spanning parts of Iraq and Syria after it captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in mid-2014.

The hardline group has since lost most cities it captured in Iraq and its fighters are now surrounded in parts of Mosul by U.S.-backed Iraqi government forces.

A U.S.-backed offensive is also under way to capture Raqqa, involving a Syrian Kurdish-Arab militia alliance.

Source: Timesofoman