Deso Dogg, a German rapper turned ISIS militant, has been killed during a military action in Syria, the Guardian reports.
Deso Dogg was previously thought to be dead back in 2014; this time, his death has been confirmed by a U.S.-based monitoring group called SITE. SITE verified the death through reports that have been circulating on pro-ISIS media outlets. One in particular, the Wafa Media Foundation, showed explicit images of Deso Dogg's corpse.
Born Denis Cuspert, Deso Dogg recorded three records that met with enough success to put him on tour with DMX back in 2006.
He converted to Islam a year later. After a rather serious car crash in 2010, Deso Dogg began to gravitate towards radical elements within the faith. Eventually, he left Germany and fame for Egypt, where he became the student of a radical, hardline imam.
It isn't entirely clear how he became an ISIS soldier, but he entered Syria in 2013, and was declared a terrorist by the United States in 2015. As an ISIS fighter, he took the nom de guerre Abu Talha al-Almani, and became highly visible in propaganda videos, holding a severed head in one.
The charisma that served him in his music career was set to darker purpose with ISIS. Deso Dogg was known as a top recruiter, and Berlin’s intelligence service, Verfassungsschutz, referred to him as "a pop star of jihad.”
He even convinced an FBI operative named Daniela Greene to go rogue and marry him in June 2014. A translator, CNN reports that Greene was assigned to investigate Deso Dogg. Court records suggest that they began their romance in secret using a clandestine Skype account.
After falling for the ISIS fighter, Greene told her superiors that she was going to take a trip to Germany to see her parents. Instead, she flew to Turkey, then entered Syria, making her way to where Deso Dogg was stationed. The marriage did not last; Greene escaped Syria and returned to the United States in August 2014, where she was charged with making false statements involving international terrorism. She served a two year prison sentence.
Deso Dogg was originally reported dead — also via airstrike — back in October 2015 by the Pentagon, but the department announced in August 2016 that he had actually survived the attack. He was originally from Kreuzberg in Berlin, and was 41-years-old when he died.
