Mattis Believes Baghdadi Still Alive

US Defence Secretary James Mattis said he believes that the leader of the extremist Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is still alive. His comments on July 21 come weeks after Russia and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had said Baghdadi had been killed in a Russian airstrike, although US, Iraqi, and other Western officials have never confirmed the report. “I think that he’s alive, and I’ll believe otherwise when we know we’ve killed him. But we’re going after him… we assume he’s alive,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the US Counter-Terrorism Center, echoed those comments. He said he has “seen nothing that would lead me to believe” that Baghdadi “has been removed from the battlefield.”