Al-Baghdadi Alive, Returns to Mosul

(FNA)- Leader of the ISIL terrorist group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is still alive and has returned to Mosul in Northern Iraq along with a number of other ISIL ringleaders, sources said on Monday.

"Al-Baghdadi has returned to Mosul along with two Arab and non-Arab ISIL ringleaders from Raqqa in Syria," Soumeriya news website quoted informed local sources as saying today.

The sources added that Baghdadi has secretly returned to Iraq on Sunday evening and visited a number of ISIL bases in Nineveh.

According to the report, he has managed to reach Nineveh through a desert area.

Arab media reports had said in April that al-Baghdadi had died and members of the Takfiri group in Iraq had sworn allegiance to Abu Ala Afri as his successor.

They said that Baghdadi had died in an Israeli hospital in the occupied Golan Heights where he had been hospitalized for treatment after sustaining severe injuries during a joint attack of the Iraqi army and popular forces.

The sources added that al-Baghdadi was declared by his Israeli physicians and surgeons as to be "clinically dead".

The terrorist leader was targeted in an airstrike in Western Iraq on March 18.