expenses. isis has distributed its revenues overseas for the next phase of its war. i saw him as an isis member from raqqah who oversaw the border crossings between turkey and isis territory. he tells us that isis would train and dispatch members to set up companies which then acted as facilitators, but also behaved as regular businesses. isis may no longer physically control swaths of syria and iraq. it thrives under ground and if is widely assumed that the isis leadership, abu bakhr al baghdadi and top lieutenants are in the border areas between syria and iraq. familiar territory. the first stage of the isis insurgency back in 2010 was called aggressive hibernation. making money, building networks in the deserts and cities of iraq. in many maways isis is going ba
this air strike, how does it change, one wonders, diana, the leadership of isis? reporter: well, that is the big question, to what extent has he sort of abrogated responsibility to those below him? is there, to a certain extent, a cult for isis that he has permeated throughout the organization, a culture of brutality that we saw in the attacks on yazidis, in the enslavement of populations that isis captured, and that is a hard sort of culture to eradicate from his many isis fighters, but there is a leadership that is not just controlled by baghdadi but i think you can be sure will perpetuate, even if he has been killed. al qaeda, too, has managed to continue even with the death of osama bin laden. so, you can be sure that isis
the majority of isis fighters who haven t been killed have fled out of mosul, back into syria, towards raqqah. and actually, the onslaught on raqqah, which started in the last few weeks, has been far more effective than we might have assumed. isis appears to have been fairly effectively routed from the city, and they re being pushed south. so, it certainly is in its final stages with quite a few of the top isis leadership killed. but that growth was, you know, of isis as a terrorist force and as a force that was able to occupy a substantial amount of land, that was all baghdadi s doing, so he is a major, major figure, the most wanted terrorist in the world, if you will. and if he was killed, that is, of course, a very big deal. and the brutality of his methods have been well documented torture, rape, public executions, crucifixions, i mean, paraded in front of the cameras, broadcast on social
we need to have this confirmed, this story, because we don t want to go down that rabbit hole again. for me the significance would be very carefully and systematically coalition forces have been taking out the next cadre of isis leadership. usually you would think if baghdadi goes, quickly he ll be replaced. it may be that the next ranks have been hurt so badly that that wouldn t happen so automatically, in which case getting rid of him could have a major impact. they re being squeezed, about to lose mosul and about to lose raqqa. let s bring in msnbc s ayman mohyeldin. ayman, what do you make of the reports? obviously we take them all with a grain of salt. if, in fact, he was killed, what does that mean. you have to put it in two context. one, what this means for u.s. and coalition partners in the
he may have been killed in a russian air strike last month. our cnn correspondent diana magnay is live in moscow with the breaking details. and i know i mean, i m reading some of this on the english-language sputnik news agency. they re investigating whether a may 28th news strike targeted him with a lot of other isis leadership. what do we know? reporter: that s right. well, russian state media is quoting the defense ministry as saying that it is investigating with information that suggests that he was killed in a meeting south of raqqah with a lot of other isis operatives are true, and the reports are that al baghdadi was killed in a russian air strike alongside some 330 other isis operatives as they were at a command post talking about creating an escape route, if you will, to the south of the