The US military denied that coalition aircraft bombed a mosque in Iraq after Baghdad officials said American-led warplanes had targeted Islamic State jihadists meeting at the mosque in Tal Afar.

US Central Command, which is overseeing the air war against the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria, said “we can confirm that coalition aircraft did not strike a mosque as some of the press reporting has alleged.”

The US military also said it had “no information to corroborate” that ISIS’s second-in-command, Abdul Rahman Mustafa Mohammed, had been eliminated during an airstrike by US and coalition forces.

Earlier Wednesday, Iraq’s Defense Ministry claimed Mohammed had been eliminated. The statement did not say when the raid was conducted but came with a video of the alleged hit – grainy black and white aerial footage
of a building being destroyed in an apparently scarcely populated area, according to AFP. 

Mohammed has been named as ISIS’s “acting leader” after its official chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was injured in an airstrike in March.

Last week, Washington offered a $20 million reward for information on Mohammed and three other ISIS leaders, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili, and Tariq Bin-al-Tahar Bin al Falih al-‘Awni al-Harzi.