Iraq's Tal Afar liberated, IS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's fate still unknown

The fate of IS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is still unknown even as Iraqi military spokesman said on Thursday the city of Tal Afar has been fully liberated.

"We're looking for him every day. I don't think he's dead," Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend said.

"The last stand of ISIS will be in the Middle Euphrates River Valley," Townsend said.

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Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend who is the commander of the counter-IS coalition in Iraq and Syria declared: "When we find him, I think we'll just try to kill him first. It's probably not worth all the trouble to try and capture him."

The American assessment of Baghdadi is far removed from the Russian foreign ministry's statement in June which said that there was a "high degree of certainty that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was dead".

In fact, Viktor Ozerov, the head of defence committee had told Interfax: "I think this information is close to 100 per cent."

"The fact that Islamic State has still not shown him anywhere also adds to our confidence that al-Baghdadi has been killed," he had added with some conviction.

Meanwhile,an Iraqi military spokesman declared on Thursday that the city of Tal Afar was fully liberated after a battle which lasted for eleven days.

Brigadier General Yahya Rasool, a spokesman for the Iraqi Joint Operations Command, said that government forces have also retaken control of the al-Ayadia district, northwest of Tal Afar, which meant that the whole of Nineveh Governorate is now free of IS militants.

"We had planned to open multiple fronts in the offensive and advance on multiple axes against IS. We arrived in the city center within just two days and liberated the urban area within eight days. This offensive was different from the Mosul offensive, which was more of a larger scale," Rasool said.

"We have had a lot of experience in combat. This time, we surrounded Tal Afar and launched airstrikes against IS and managed to reduce the extremists' fighting capability by more than 90 percent," Brigadier General Yahya Rasool added.

The victory in Tal Afar comes after Iraqi forces successfully liberated Mosul last month.