Reported death of Saddam Hussein’s deputy Al-Dori unconfirmed

Iraqi security officials reported Friday that Saddam Hussein’s former deputy Izzat Ibrahim, 72, was killed in battle in Tikrit and his remains are on the way to Baghdad for DNA testing to confirm his identity. In his 12 years on the run since his boss’s downfall, Izzat Ibrahim Al-Dori, has been reported killed more than once and he always turned out to have survived. DEBKAfile: Ibrahim, a field marshal in the Iraqi Baath party's army, has been running a large Sunni militia of his own, composed of former Baath army officers. It has been fighting alongside ISIS. For funding, he drew on the hundreds of millions of dollars cached in secret Saddam family bank accounts in various parts of the Middle East. Since Izzat Ibrahim fled Iraq to Syria in 2003, he was never been sighted in person by any Western or Iraqi intelligence agency.