[BBC] A senior Islamic State military commander in Iraq has been killed in an air strike on the northern city of djinn-infested Mosul... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
, Iraqi state media report.
Iraq's defence ministry also said a top aide to IS leader His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
...formerly merely the head of ISIL and a veteran of the Bagram jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us...
had been killed in a strike on Mosul, but neither death has been confirmed.
Separately, IS fighters were reported to have kidnapped 40 men from a town in northern Iraq on Thursday.
The group has taken over swathes of Iraq and Syria in recent months.
Iraqiya TV quoted defence officials as saying Abu Alaa al-Iraqi, head of the IS military council in the city of Tal Afar, had died in an air strike.
Earlier reports on social media had suggested that al-Baghdadi himself had been killed in a separate strike on Mosul.
But the defence ministry said intelligence suggested the strike had killed one of the leader's senior aides instead.
US forces began carrying out air strikes on IS positions in August after they took over several cities in northern Iraq. It is unclear whether the latest strikes were by US or Iraqi forces.