ISIS’s new leader has been identified as a Somali who preached in UK mosques for a number of years, helping to recruit British fighters for the terror group. Abdul Qadir Mumin is the latest head of the Islamic extremists, who continue to cause carnage around the world, despite losing their Caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2009.

He was identified as the effective head of the terror organisation in April by US officials, after General Michael Langley, then head of U.S. Africa Command, told Congress that ISIS is run from Somalia. Mumin is believed to have come into contact with a number of notorious British jihadis during his time in Britain. One was Mohammed Emwazi aka “Jihadi John”, one of the notorious ISIS Beatles who helped execute kidnapped western journalists and aid workers in Iraq and Syria in 2014 and 2015.

The other was Michael Adebolajo, who murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby with a meat cleaver near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich in 2013.

The two men were known to have attended Greenwich Mosque, where Mumin preached as a visiting speaker, after being expelled for his extreme religious views from the Quba Mosque in Leicester. The convicted British terrorists also tried unsuccessfully to join extremist groups in Somalia.

Mumin came to the UK in around 2000 after he was forced to leave Sweden, after telling an undercover journalist that he would be willing to circumcise his daughter.

He fled the UK in 2010 after M15 launched an investigation into his role in radicalising young men.

The jihadist is perhaps best known for burning his British passport in front of a crowd of supporters at a mosque.

Once back in Africa, he pledged allegiance to then ISIS-chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October 2015, before creating the “Islamic State in Somalia”.

He boosted its ranks from 30 to 1,2000 fighters by 2024, and made his unit the biggest and most powerful one in the terror organisation.

ISIS Somalia is believed to have funded a number of global terror attacks, including two suicide bombings outside the Kabul airport in 2021, which killed 169 Afghans and 13 US troops.

Mumin runs his network from the remote Cal Miskaad mountains in Puntland, a semi-autonomous region in northeast Somalia.

His stronghold has ben targeted in recent days by around 200 American special forces and Somalian counterterrorism units from Puntland.

Initial assessments indicate that a senior ISIS commander and between 10 and 15 militants from Syria, Turkey and Ethiopia were killed in the attack.