Abu Nabil al Anbari

Abu Nabil al Anbari also identified as Wissam Najm Abd Zayd al Zubaydi was reportedly the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Libya. Al-Anbari is believed by Pentagon officials to have been killed by a US military airstrike, carried out by two F-15 military aircraft, on 13 November 2015, outside of Derna in eastern Libya. It was the first military action by the United States against an ISIL target outside of Iraq and Syria while still under the command and control of the core organization’s leadership (As opposed to militants in Nigeria and Afghanistan who have been struck but are not believed to be directly linked to the Iraq and Syria based leadership by US Officials).

Abu Nabil al-Anbari was an Iraqi national who was for a long-time an al-Qaida operative and had previously led Al-Qaeda in Iraq operations between Fallujah and Ramadi from 2004 to 2010. He was part of an ISIL delegation dispatched from Iraq by the group's leadership to Libya in September 2014, to gather pledges of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and lead the nascent ISIL branch in Libya.

In a statement, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said that the operation was "authorised and initiated prior to the terrorist attack in Paris." He added that "Abu Nabil's death will degrade [ISIL's] ability to meet the group's objectives in Libya, including recruiting new members, establishing bases in Libya, and planning external attacks on the United States." He added: "Reporting suggests [he] may also have been the spokesman in the February 2015 Coptic Christian execution video," referring to a video which showed the beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts in Libya after their kidnapping in 2015.

The Libya Herald, quoting unnamed sources in Derna, claimed that al-Anbari was not killed in the US airstrike and was not in Derna at the time.