Jamal Ja'far Muhammad Ali Al Ibrahim (Arabic: جمال جعفر محمد علي آل إبراهيم Jamāl Jaʿfar Muḥammad ʿAlīy ʾĀl ʾIbrāhīm, 16 November 1954 – 3 January 2020), better known by his kunya Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (Arabic: أبو مهدي المهندس, lit.

He became the commander of volunteer militias that grew from the need to combat ISIS, including the Kata'ib Hezbollah paramilitary group,[1][2] which is designated a terror organisation by the governments of Japan, the US and the UAE;[3] and prior to that worked with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) against Saddam's regime.

He was born on 16 November 1954 in Abu Al-Khaseeb District, Basra Governorate, Iraq,[13] to an Iraqi father and an Iranian mother.

[7] He finished his studies in engineering in 1977 and in the same year joined the Iraq-based Shi'te Dawa Party, which opposed the Ba'athist government.

[14] Al-Muhandis fled, across the border to Ahvaz in Iran, where the Iranians had set up a camp to train Iraqi dissidents, with the aim of undermining Saddam.

[14] He began working with Iran's Revolutionary Guard in Kuwait in 1983, organizing attacks on embassies of countries that supported Saddam in the Iran–Iraq War.

[7] When U.S. officials realised his identity and connection with the 1983 attacks, they raised the issue with then-Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in 2006 or 2007.

[15][16] He returned to Iraq following the withdrawal of US troops (December 2011) to head the Kata'ib Hezbollah militia;[4] he then became deputy chief of the Popular Mobilization Forces.

On 6 January, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei held funeral prayers among hundreds of thousands of people and crying in front of the flag-draped coffins for the deceased.

[38] On 8 January, Al-Muhandis was buried in Iraq's Najaf where hundreds of mourners gathered to pay their final respects.