US sentences Iraqi man for pretending to be intelligence officer in letter to PM

An Iraqi national who sent a phony letter to the prime minister of Iraq has been sentenced to two years on probation.

Wathiq al-Ibraheemi falsely claimed to be a US intelligence official in the November 2015 letter to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. He pleaded guilty in January to unauthorised use of an official insignia.

Assistant US Attorney Craig Gabriel says the note suggesting the prime minister replace the country's intelligence chief with another man reached the highest levels of Iraqi government before it was turned over to the US officials.

The Beaverton, Oregon, resident was expected to get one year of probation at Tuesday's sentencing, but got another year after it was discovered that he or someone he knows falsely altered a news article about his guilty plea.

He served as an interpreter for the US military in Iraq before immigrating.

This comes after IS leader’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s right hand man was thought to be killed in a US backed operation.

Abu Walid al-Checheni was killed during an Iraqi military operation supported by the US air force in Kirkuk in the early hours of Monday morning, just days after two IS attacks killed seven people in the country. 

Iraqi military sources from the western Iraqi province, located 250km north of Baghdad, revealed to The New Arab's sister site al-Araby al-Jadeed that a prominent IS chief "of foreign origin" had been killed during a military ambush south of Wadi Hamreen in the early hours of Monday morning.

Latest reports issued by the Iraqi military say that two thirds of IS' leaders from the so-called "first generation" of fighters have been killed over ther past three years by coalition airstrikes and ground-level battles waged by Iraqi forces.