ISIL commander Omar the Chechen confirmed dead

Omar al-Shishani, a top ISIL commander who was a magnet for fighters from the former Soviet Union, has died of wounds suffered in a United States air strike in Syria, a senior Iraqi official and a Syrian activist group said.

Shishani, whose real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili, was wounded this month and died on Monday outside the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s main stronghold of Raqqa, in Syria, the sources told the AP news agency. A US military spokesman confirmed the reports.

However, the father of the commander, Teimuraz Batirashvili said on Wednesday that the information was incorrect.

“All is a lie. He is not even wounded. He is fine,” he told Georgian TV crews outside his house in Georgia’s Birkiani village, saying “trusted” sources had confirmed to him his son was healthy “and continues to do his work”. Batirashvili did not name the sources.

The red-bearded Shishani, from a small village of Birkiani in Georgia’s Pankisi valley, in his 30s, was one of the most prominent ISIL commanders, appearing in several online videos leading fighters into battle. He served as the top commander in Syria before being appointed to lead three elite units that carried out special missions in Syria and Iraq, according to Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar who closely follows the group.

READ MORE: Why Georgians in a remote valley are joining ISIL

He first surfaced in Syria in 2013 with his nom de guerre, which means “Omar the Chechen” in Arabic, leading an al-Qaeda-inspired group called “the Army of Emigrants and Partisans”, which included a large number of fighters from the former Soviet Union.

Some 1,500 battle-hardened fighters from the Caucasus region joined ISIL because of Shishani, Hashimi said.

A US air strike targeted Shishani on March 4 near eastern Syrian town of Shaddadeh, Peter, Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, said last week.

Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said after Shishani was wounded, ISIL “brought a number of doctors to treat him, but they were not able to”.

The spokesman for the US-led coalition, Army Colonel Steve Warren, said on Tuesday the coalition was able to “assess that he is dead” and that it “got the word Monday morning.”