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.
Wissam Najm was killed by a US military airstrike, carried out by two F-15 military aircraft, the Pentagon said on 13 November 2015 immediately after the November 2015 Paris attacks.
It was the first military action against ISIL by the United States outside of Iraq and Syria.
Wissam Najm was an Iraqi national who was for a long-time 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 “Wissam Najm 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, Wissam Najm 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.