Top ISIS commander reported killed by USA appears fighting Iraqi forces in Fallujah

ISIS senior operative, Abu Omar al-Shishani, has recently been filmed in Iraq’s Fallujah battlefield, fighting the Iraqi Army and paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces. The red-beard Georgian veteran was reported dead several times; most recently last March when the Pentagon announced that al-Shishani was killed in an airstrike near the town of al-Shaddadi in eastern Syria.

Al-Shishani, originally Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili, served in the Georgian Army during the Russo-Georgian war. After being discharged from the Georgian military, he joined the radical militants fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad in the Syrian war. Batirashvili  led  Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (Army of Emigrants and Supporters) in Northern Aleppo; a group of ultraconservative fighters mostly from Chechnya and the Caucasus.

Later on he joined the ranks of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and became the Emir of Northern Syria and member of the group’s Shura council. Between 214 and 2016, Al-Shishani was reported killed and captured 10 times; all of which proved to be untrue.