The impact of the death of Abu Ibrahim Hashimi Al Qurashi (born Amir Muhammad Said Abdul Rahman Al Mawla) – who blew himself up during an operation by US forces, according to the White House – is difficult to assess and his death raises a lot of questions about the Jihadist groups' situation.
Before assuming the lead of Daesh, Al Qurashi had participated in the massacres of the Yazidi minority and he was more of a fanatic. The man of Turkmen origin was nicknamed "professor" and "destroyer". He succeeded Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, killed by an American operation in October 2019, but he remains less well known than his two predecessors.
Al Qurashi's death comes as Daesh has re-entered the news with an assault on a prison in Syria's Hasakeh region that left 373 people dead. The jihadist body has made a name for itself in Iraq and Syria, where it declared a caliphate in 2014. It was defeated in 2019, but has not been stopped.
The terrorist movement is growing outside the Middle East, in the Philippines or in the African Sahel, for example. The Islamic State in Khorasan (ISIS-K) branch came to prominence in Afghanistan with suicide bombings. In several territories, there are dissensions and clashes between different jihadist groups, whether they claim to be from the Islamic State or Al Qaeda. In the region where Al Qurashi died, the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al Sham is also present. Both Al Qurashi and Al Baghdadi were killed in territory partly controlled by this group and this may be an indication that Daesh became weak, because there is competition between jihadist groups in the region.