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Russia 'may have killed' ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, according to new reports.

Russia's defence ministry says it targeted a meeting of IS leaders in Raqqa where they believe al-Baghdadi was in attendance.

The ministry has started an investigation as to whether their air strike on Syria could have been responsible for the militant's death.

It comes after unverified reports in Syrian state media that the leader of Islamic State was killed in an air strike on May 28.

The defence ministry said in a statement: "According to information that is being checked through various channels, IS leader Ibrahim Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed as a result of the strike, was also present at the meeting.

(Image: REUTERS) (Image: Getty) (Image: Getty)

"As a result of the Su-35 and Su-34 air strikes, high-ranking commanders of the terrorist group that were part of the so-called military council of IGIL, as well as about 30 middle-level field commanders and up to 300 militants of their personal protection, were killed.

"Among the liquidated terrorists are the emir of Rakki Abu al-Hadji al-Mysri, the emir Ibrahim An-Naef al-Hajj, who controlled the area from the city of Rakki up to the present. Es-Suhne and the head of the security service of IGIL, Suleiman Al-Shawah."

The statement added: "During the verification of the information, it was possible to find out in that the purpose of the meeting was planning the routes for the exit of militants from Raqqa through the so-called 'southern corridor'."

But Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, cast doubt on the report Baghdadi may have been killed. He said that according to his information, Baghdadi was located in another part of Syria at the end of May.

"The information is that as of the end of last month, Baghdadi was in Deir al-Zor, in the area between Deir al-Zor and Iraq, in Syrian territory," he said by phone.

Questioning what Baghdadi would have been doing in that location, he said: "Is it reasonable that Baghdadi would put himself between a rock and a hard place of the (US-led) coalition and Russia?"

Heavy artillery was dropped across the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa throughout the day, with footage online posted by ISIS news agency Amaq revealing the devastation caused.

The Islamic State leader has a £20million bounty on his head because his hate-filled sermons inspired suicide attacks across Europe. There have been previous reports of al-Baghdadi's death, which turned out to be untrue.

Recent evidence unearthed for a documentary shows Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi escaped capture in Iraq by just minutes back in 2013, before unleashing his army of jihadis on the world.

The revelation has emerged as Iraqi forces claimed al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Ayad al-Jumaili, was killed in an air strike near Iraq’s border with Syria.

Jumaili, an intelligence officer under Saddam Hussein, was described in an Iraqi TV report as Islamic State’s “second-in-command” and “war minister”.

As Iraqi forces besiege al-Baghdadi’s former stronghold in Mosul, the caliphate he declared in the city’s main mosque back in 2014 is crumbling apart.

The film, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: In The Footsteps Of The Most Wanted Man In The World, suggests swifter reactions earlier in the 45-year-old’s rise to power might have brought an end to the IS reign of terror sooner.

Moroccan documentary maker Sofia Amara explains how elite troops from Iraq’s Falcon Brigade missed out on capturing him by just minutes.

(Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) (Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images)

Like Saddam Hussein before him, al-Baghdadi was hiding in a basement bolthole, accessed through a disguised entrance in a tiled floor.

He escaped the hideout in northern Baghdad before soldiers arrived, leaving behind a cache of weapons, documents and black IS flags – the now familiar symbol of the reviled terror network.

The mission’s failure enabled the extremist, born in the Iraqi city of Samarra, to become the world’s most wanted man at the helm of a self-declared caliphate across his home country and neighbouring Syria.

(Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) (Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images)

It also allowed IS to inspire a series of bloody terrorist atrocities.

Western jihadis like Paris grocery store attacker Amedy Coulibaly, and the two French-born militants who slit the throat of a Catholic priest in Rouen last year, have claimed allegiance to IS

Since being filmed apparently preaching from the pulpit inside Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri in July 2014, al-Baghdadi has not been seen in public.

(Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images)

And despite being the target of multiple bombing raids, analysts believe he remains at large.

He was reportedly badly wounded during an airstrike in the same district in March 2015. As with so many stories surrounding al-Baghdadi, what really happened remains a mystery.

In the film, Amara claims she too is holed up near the Iraq-Syria border.

She spent a year following in the elusive footsteps of the man previously referred to by his acolytes as First Emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

(Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images)

Her research brought her into contact with his childhood friends, a former wife and several sex slaves.

The most telling anecdotes came from one of the girls, called Suzanne, who claims she was held as recently as last year. She claimed his home at the time was “like a big whorehouse”.

“There was sex all the time,” she says. “His wives were fighting over who would wear more make-up than the other.

“They used to bring girls for him to have sex with, and he would stay in the house and never go fighting.”

Another girl, who remains in hiding, told Amara she knew kidnapped ­American aid worker Kayla Mueller.

Kayla, who was abducted in Aleppo in 2013, was reportedly forced to marry al-Baghdadi, who raped her repeatedly. The American was killed in a Jordanian airstrike on IS-controlled Raqqa in 2015.

Those who knew al-Baghdadi as a child paint a very different picture.

(Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images)

He came from a poor family living in the Tobji suburb of northern Baghdad.

A talented footballer, friends nicknamed him “The Maradona of Tobji”.

Another described the young al-­Baghdadi as a “nice boy”, who was funny and shy. Determined to do well under Saddam Hussein’s regime al-­Baghdadi dreamed of becoming a lawyer but failed to secure good enough grades. He focused his attentions on the Iraqi Army but was again turned away, this time because he was short-sighted.

A former wife, Saja, also agreed to speak at length for the first time for the documentary, which was shown on French television last month.

Married to the extremist for only three months when he was a Muslim cleric in Baghdad, she insists she never loved him.

(Image: Abaca/Sofia Amara/Barcroft Images)

She reveals he would come home from his work at university, have dinner alone and take care of his cat.

One of his many purported children is Hagar, Saja’s daughter. The nine-year-old and her mum are in hiding from IS following threats to their lives.

Little Hagar, who plays with a water pistol in the film, only knows her father as a “bad man”, but not his true identity.

Her mother claims: “She is punished because she is the daughter of the most wanted criminal in the world.”

(Image: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images)

Those who knew al-Baghdadi as an intense Muslim scholar at university cannot believe his rise to power.

Although he held a pathological hatred of the West from an early age, few thought he would go on to create the biggest terror threat the world has ever seen.

The experience of being imprisoned by US forces after the invasion of Iraq seems to have been a formative factor.

One fellow inmate, who knew him at the grim desert prison Camp Bucca, said: “He has undergone a radical transformation. I would never have thought he would become the person he is now.”