Reports of al-Baghdadi's death regularly surface, but the statement Friday was the first time Russian Federation acknowledged that it may have killed him.
Russian Federation says it may have killed the head of ISIS Ibrahim Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi and the leadership of the terrorist organisation. The U.S. -led coalition fighting ISIS said it could not confirm the Russian report that Baghdadi may have been killed.
"The strike, carried out by Su-35 and Su-34 jets, destroyed high-ranking commanders of the terrorist group, who were part of the so-called military council of the IS, and also some 30 middle ranking field commanders and up to 300 militants who were their bodyguards", the ministry added.
The report of al-Baghdadi's death comes as Daesh suffers major setbacks in which they have lost wide areas of territory and both of their strongholds - Mosul in Iraq and Syria's Raqqa.
There have been numerous claims regarding al-Baghdadi's death before he resurfaces again but Moscow seems confident that he has been finally eliminated. In a statement, the ministry said it was still seeking confirmation following the strike in late May.
US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have been pushing into Raqqa on three fronts, last Tuesday breaking into the ISIL bastion from the east for the first time. It said it had informed the U.S. in advance of the strike.
The ISIS-run Aamaq news agency did not confirm the death of the militant leader.
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Such were their concerns after the tests that the information was immediately shared with government to disseminate more widely. McCormack says: "What we haven't got is a picture of how many people might have been in there".
The ministry said the IS leaders were gathered to discuss the group's withdrawal from Raqqa, the group's de facto capital.
The area south of Raqqa has been controlled by ISIS, while the US-led global coalition to defeat ISIS has been supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who had been imposing a crescent-shaped siege on Raqqa city from the west, north, and east.
His only public appearance since claiming the creation of an IS caliphate was in a video in June 2014, in which he was seen delivering a sermon in Mosul after IS took control of the city.
The U.K. -based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the battlefield situation through a network of activists on the ground, recorded no Russian airstrike on Raqqa on May 28, according to the group's head, Rami Abdurrahman.
Questioning what Baghdadi would have been doing in that location, he said: "Is it reasonable that Baghdadi would put himself between a rock and a hard place of the [US-led] coalition and Russian Federation?"
Reports about Baghdadi being killed or injured in air raids by coalition forces seem to emerge every few months.
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