PENTAGON chief Jim Mattis has said that be believes that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is alive, despite Russia claiming it killed him in an airstrike in Syria last month.
Mattis said he had seen no evidence that the terror chief is dead, following weeks of speculation over his death.
“I think Baghdadi’s alive,” Mattis said. “I think that he is alive, and I’ll believe otherwise when we know we’ve killed him.
“We are going after him, but we assume he is alive.”
He added: “For obvious reasons, we’re trying to track him pretty closely because he’s declared war on us, so he is going to reap his reward for it.”
Al-Baghdadi was thought dead following a Russian airstrike on Raqqa that took out dozens of top terror commanders.
Moscow had said evil Al-Baghdadi was holding a crisis meeting with 30 of his jihadi commanders and 300 fighters in the Syrian city when Putin’s planes struck.
Moscow’s defence ministry issued a statement at the time saying: “IS leader Ibrahim Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed as a result of the strike, was also present at the meeting.”
Earlier this week Kurdish counter-terrorism officials issued a statement saying they believed that al-Baghdadi was still alive.
Lahur Talabany said that he was 99 per cent certain the ISIS boss was still living.
Speaking to Reuters, he said: “We have information that he is alive. We believe 99 per cent he is alive.
“He knows what he is doing.”
Iraqi native al-Baghdadi has not been seen since making his only known public appearance as “caliph” in 2014 at the Grand Mosque of Al-Nuri in Mosul, which was destroyed in the battle for Iraq’s second city.
He has a $25 million bounty on his head and was rumoured to move throughout ISIS-held territory in Iraq and Syria.