Muhammad Hamed/REUTERS
Pentagon officials Monday denied new assertions that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had been seriously injured in a coalition raid. Army Col. Steven Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said al-Baghdadi continues to lead the group and that the U.S. military has no reason to believe he was injured in a coalition airstrike. “We have no updates to his status,” Warren told reporters. Privately, a senior U.S. official said there was no evidence in the intelligence available that al-Baghdadi had been injured, but rather suggestions that he was alive, healthy, and actively leading the group. Yet defectors tell The Daily Beast that doctors had been brought to the Syrian city of Raqqa, where al-Baghdadi resides, to provide him with medical care for shrapnel wounds in his spine that immobilized his left leg. Reports first emerged in The Guardian last month that al-Baghdadi had been injured during a coalition airstrike March 18 in Iraq. At least one Iraqi official, Hisham al-Hashimi told the British newspaper that al-Baghdadi was “wounded in al-Baaj near the village of Umm al-Rous on 18 March with a group that was with him” in a three-car convoy.