ISIS Airstrike Kills 15; Islamic Leader Dead?

The US has not been letting up on its airstrikes on Islamic group militants in Iraq and Syria for the past couple of weeks and the series of air assaults last Friday may have hit paydirt.

American warplanes attacked a convoy of 10 armed trucks near Mosul in Iraq in an attempt to kill ISIS leaders, including its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, reports CNN.

Mosul is Iraq's second largest city that straddles near the Syrian border. It is crucial to the terrorist operations of ISIS because of the presence of material resources in the city including Iraq's largest hydroelectric dam, cites CNN.

"Mosul is also the site of one of ISIS's greatest battlefield victories," the report added.

"The strike demonstrates the pressure we continue to place on the ISIL terrorist and network and the group's increasingly limited freedom to maneuver, communicate and command," a US defense official told Fox News.

ISIL is another acronym being used to represent ISIS, which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It used to be known as al Qaeda in Iraq, details Vox.

CNN said that Col. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman of the US Central Command, said on Saturday that he could not confirm whether the top ISIS leader was part and killed in the convoy.

Ryder was responding to initial news reports that came after the US-led airstrikes that al-Baghdadi may have died or have been injured as a result of the bombings.

"I can confirm that coalition aircraft did conduct a series of airstrikes on Friday evening in Iraq against what was assessed to be a gathering of ISIL leaders near Mosul, destroying a vehicle convoy consisting of 10 ISIL armed trucks," Ryder said.

It was not clear how many were killed during the Friday airstrikes.

But in another airstrike on Saturday in the ISIS stronghold in the town of Al-Qaim in Anbar province, near the border of Syria, some 15 people were killed while 31 others were injured, a witness in the ground told CNN.

The Saturday airstrike reportedly hit a market near an ISIS checkpoint in Al-Qaim, says the witness who was a local resident. He went to the hospital after the airstrike and it was there that he saw and counted the number of wounded.

CNN said that Al-Qaim, which is 286 kilometers from Mosul, became a stronghold for ISIS after militants took control of it in June.

The Sunni Muslim extremist group overran the city in June causing soldiers and police officers to either flee or join the insurgents, reports Fox News.