It was a rare stroke of luck for Somali and US forces locked in a grinding war against the Islamic State’s most dangerous surviving branch. A captured ISIS fighter, exhausted and bleeding in an interrogation room, finally whispered the location of Abdul Qadir Mumin’s mountain hideout — a cave high in the desolate ranges of northern Somalia. Hours later, American jets tore through the sky and unleashed a barrage of missiles. When the smoke lifted, Puntland soldiers combed through scorched rock and charred bodies. None of them belonged to Mumin. Once again, the man believed to be the global leader of ISIS had vanished into the hills. As The Times UK details, it was the latest in a decade-long pattern: a fugitive mastermind slipping away at the last moment, leaving devastation in his wake.
For Captain Omar Yusuf Mohamed of the Puntland Maritime Police Force, the failed strike was only a temporary setback. The 40-year-old officer, who has spent years fighting the militants in the mountains, says killing Mumin is “the happiest day” he hopes to live to see. “He’s like a virus,” he says, “infecting our land with hatred and bringing death to our people.” The battle he describes is not a local insurgency but a global conflict pushed into one of the most remote landscapes on Earth — a war that has reshaped ISIS, and one that Mumin has exploited to build a new centre of power.
When the ISIS “caliphate” collapsed in Syria and Iraq in 2019, the group did not fade into obscurity as many hoped. Instead, it splintered and metastasised. The most powerful offshoot emerged where few in the West were paying attention: the Cal Miskaad mountains of Puntland, a semi-autonomous region in northern Somalia. There, Mumin — a native of Puntland who spent a decade living in Britain before fleeing MI5 scrutiny — began rebuilding the organisation from near nothing. With fewer than 30 loyal men in 2015, he crafted a strategy of survival and expansion. By the end of 2024, he commanded some 1,200 fighters, and Western intelligence concluded that ISIS Somalia had become the global hub for funding and coordinating attacks, including the 2021 Kabul airport bombing that killed nearly 200 people. In 2025, General Michael Langley, then head of US Africa Command, told Congress bluntly: “ISIS controls their global network from Somalia.”
That warning triggered a more aggressive campaign to crush Mumin’s organisation. Intelligence suggested he was plotting to seize Bosaso, Puntland’s critical port city. Puntland forces, with air support from US jets, pushed deep into the Cal Miskaad range, fighting a brutal year-long campaign through ravines, caves and labyrinthine mountain passes. On November 25, 200 American special forces descended into the Baalade Valley in MH-60 helicopters and blasted their way through fortified cave systems, killing militants from Syria, Turkey and Ethiopia. Puntland intelligence estimates that only around 200 ISIS fighters remain. Mumin is not among them. He moves constantly, on foot and at night, living like a nomad, sending only handwritten messages to his advisers, often disguised and always out of reach.
His tactics mirror those of Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001. Mumin has long idolised the late al-Qaeda leader. “We will continue our holy war until we taste death like our brother Osama,” he once declared. “Or until we are victorious and rule the entire world.” What makes Mumin’s rise remarkable is that he does not meet the traditional qualifications for an ISIS caliph — he claims no lineage from the Prophet Muhammad. His ascent reflects the strength of his charisma, his skills as a recruiter, and the willingness of ISIS’s remnants to rally behind the leader who remained free.
Mumin’s journey to the top of ISIS began far from these mountains. Born in Puntland in the early 1950s, he fled Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s and resettled first in Sweden, then in England. In Leicester and later London, he built a following as a preacher known for his red-dyed beard and gleaming white teeth — and for a doctrine that alarmed worshippers and mosque leaders. It was in London that he crossed paths with two future jihadist celebrities: Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John,” and Michael Adebolajo, murderer of Fusilier Lee Rigby. Both men attended Greenwich Mosque, where Mumin delivered sermons and quietly recruited young men. Intelligence sources say he was a central figure in a “recruiting network” targeting disaffected British-Somali youths. He frequented mafrishes — cafes where khat was chewed late into the night — and pressed young men to join extremist groups in Somalia.
When MI5 began investigating him, Mumin complained of harassment and abruptly fled the UK in 2010. Back in Somalia, he swore allegiance to al-Shabaab, then defected to ISIS five years later in a gravelly audio recording proclaiming loyalty to the caliphate. Only about two dozen fighters joined him initially; few believed he posed any real threat. They were wrong.
Today, the world he built in the mountains resembles a troglodyte kingdom. In the valley of Baalade, bodies lie uncollected and rot under the sun. At night, the screams of wounded fighters echo across the rocks. The caves ISIS occupied were fortified into a makeshift society: hospitals with CT scanners, armouries, workshops with sewing machines and half-made shoes, and family quarters where the wives and children of fighters lived. At one point, approximately 800 women and children accompanied the 1,200-strong force. Somali troops have found nappies, expensive handbags, stimulant pills, and the remnants of meals eaten in darkness. “They tried to create a whole world for themselves here,” says Ahmed Gallow of the Puntland Intelligence Security Agency. “They believed they would never be defeated.”
The war reveals a landscape frozen in time and, simultaneously, a battlefield of the future. Some supply routes remain so inaccessible that equipment must be carried by camel or donkey. Yet Puntland troops have also endured drone strikes — an arsenal smuggled across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen — as well as snipers, RPGs, improvised mines and a cache of more than 2,000 long-range missiles intended for the aborted assault on Bosaso. Colonel Abdiaziz Sankusocod, nearly killed by an IED in March, points to the sophisticated designs of the missiles as proof of foreign engineering expertise: “They know what they are doing.”
ISIS’s ranks include fighters from more than 30 countries. At PMPF headquarters in Bosaso, officers leaf through the passports of the dead: Tanzanian, Moroccan, Yemeni, Canadian, Argentinian, German. Many were die-hard jihadists; others were naive recruits lured by promises of a salary and a wife. Propaganda videos show masked men training in Shebaab, their mountain capital, before receiving blessings from Mumin himself, a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder.
For Puntland, this is not only a counterterrorism operation but a defence of their homeland. Major Burhan Said Ali estimates he has lost more than 50 comrades this year alone. He is clear about the stakes. “They came to our land and used the name of religion to kill people,” he says. “Mumin brought them here. And we won’t stop until we have him.”
Whether that moment is hours, months or years away remains unknown. But one thing is certain: as long as Abdul Qadir Mumin moves through the caves of Cal Miskaad under cover of night, ISIS’s most dangerous surviving leader is still alive — and the war he rebuilt from the ruins of the caliphate continues.
