A BLOODLUST preacher who swapped the mosques of London for the caves of Somalia is believed to be the new supreme leader of ISIS.
The slippery, orange-bearded Abdul Qadir Mumin now commands a global network of fighters from his hideout, and has survived repeated assassination attempts.
Somali forces have been hunting for Mumin since the start of this year with support from the US.
After a captured ISIS fighter revealed his location, American jets pummelled a network of heavily-fortified caves in the Puntland region with missiles last week.
Inspecting the wreckage, soldiers found a number of charred corpses – but none of them belonged to Mumin.
He is believed to still be at large.
Mumin was born in Puntland in the 1950s and spent much of his life in Somalia, before fleeing during the civil war.
He first settled in Gothenburg, Sweden with his wife and a young child, but was forced to move on after telling an undercover reporter he would subject his own daughter to genital mutilation.
Mumin moved to the UK around the turn of the century and became a preacher at Quba Mosque in Leicester.
His extreme interpretation of Islam soon attracted complaints from the local Muslim community.
London was his next stop – where he became a visiting speaker at Greenwich Mosque.
Security sources told The Times that he was part of a powerful “recruiting network” that was enlisting dozens of young Britons to travel to Somalia – as he would eventually do himself.
He reportedly prowled the capital’s “mafrishes” – community cafés where young men from Somalia and Ethiopia would meet – looking for new recruits.
While in the capital, he crossed paths with two of Britain’s most notorious terrorists.
He met Jihadi John (Mohammed Emwazi), one of the ISIS Beatles who beheaded westerners on camera in 2014 and 2015, Michael Adebolajo, who murdered Lee Rigby with a meat cleaver in 2013.
Both men were known to have attended Greenwich Mosque, and would later make failed attempts to join extremist groups in Somalia.
Complaining of harassment by the security services, Mumin fled the UK in 2010 and returned to Somalia, where he immediately pledged allegiance to al-Shabaab – a jihadi movement aligned with al-Qaeda.
It was in 2015 that he defected to ISIS, announcing the move via a grainy audio recording online.
The self-declared Islamic caliphate of Syria and Iraq came crumbling down in 2019, but this did not spell the extinction of ISIS.
Rather, its gun-toting terrorists were driven underground – and some of them found their way to Somalia.
Political instability in eastern Africa has allowed the jihadists to regroup and grow, undisturbed by prying governments.
From the remote Cal Miskaad mountains in Puntland, a semi-autonomous region in northeast Somalia, Mumin sought to revive the caliphate from the ruins.
He expanded the group’s forces from 30 to around 1,200 fighters by the end of 2024.
Mumin has nurtured the Somalian cell into one of the key global branches within ISIS – and it is thought to have funded a number of terror attacks around the world.
Among these are the two suicide bombings outside the Kabul airport in 2021, which killed 169 Afghans and 13 US troops.
In April, General Michael Langley, then head of US Africa Command, told Congress that “ISIS controls their global network from Somalia”, and American officials described Mumin as the group’s new chief.
When intelligence indicated Mumin was plotting to seize the port city of Bosaso in the north-eastern corner of Somalia, both Puntland forces and US officials launched into the fight against him.
After almost a year of intense conflict supported by American airstrikes, Mumin’s forces have been heavily weakened but the ISIS leader is still on the run.
