Secretary of Defense Ash Carter says Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s “days are numbered.”
“I’m just confident,” Carter told Charlie Rose in a PBS interview Thursday.
“I don’t want to say any more than that, but I wouldn’t want to be a senior ISIL leader. Many of them have died already. The more we do, the more we learn about where they are. So, his days are numbered and that’s true of all the rest of the leadership,” he said, using an alternate acronym for the terrorist group.
Carter explained that Baghdadi “moves around,” adding that if U.S. officials knew exactly where the terrorist leader was, “he wouldn’t have long.”
{mosads}Baghdadi’s whereabouts have remained unclear, at least to the public. Some U.S. officials have theorized that Baghdadi has long been hiding among civilians in Raqqa, Syria, ISIS’s de facto capital, CNN reported.
Reports surfaced in June that Baghdadi had been wounded in a U.S. airstrike. But neither U.S. nor Iraqi officials could confirm that report, and it is widely accepted that Baghdadi is still actively leading the self-proclaimed caliphate.