Pentagon claims death of a Daesh leader in Iraq

The leader of Daesh in Iraq's Anbar province was killed last week in a U.S. airstrike, the Pentagon said Monday.

Anti-Daesh coalition aircraft on Friday targeted Shaker Wahib al-Dulaimi, also known as Abu Wahib, according to spokesman Peter Cook.

“That strike near Ruthba was successful, killing Abu Wahib and three other ISIL jihadists," he said, adding that the militant had appeared in the militant group's execution videos.

The announcement is the fourth time Abu Wahib has been reported killed but Cook said the Pentagon is confident this time that he was dead though he declined to provide specifics.

After being accused of having links to al-Qaeda, Abu Wahib is believed to have been captured by U.S. forces in 2006 and held at Camp Bucca, a prison maintained by the U.S. military in the vicinity of the southern city of Umm Qasr, until 2009, according to local reports.

He was sentenced to death and transferred to a prison in Tikrit but in 2012 he was one of 100 inmates who managed to escape after Daesh leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi orchestrated a jailbreak.