Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State, was nearly killed back in March by a coalition air strike — likely by the U.S. — according to the Guardian. He has recovered somewhat from his injuries, which were thought to be life-threatening, but he hasn’t resumed day-to-day control of the group, the paper says.

Baghdadi has reportedly been spending his time just on the Iraqi side of the Iraq-Syria border, in Nineveh province. There have been false reports of serious injuries to Baghdadi in the past, but this injury report was confirmed to the Guardian by a number of sources and seems reliable.

Two other top Islamic State leaders, the Guardian notes, were killed in December air strikes, one of which almost hit Baghdadi, too. This has also not been a good couple months for the Islamic State: It lost control of Tikrit, Iraq’s fourth-largest city, to Shiite militias, over the last couple months, and it’s lost control of a chunk of northern Syria to Kurdish forces.

But regarding Baghdadi himself, Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal, a well-respected watcher of terror groups in the region, isn’t too optimistic:

Moreover, as the Guardian story notes, Baghdadi may have been in some kind of day-to-day command before his injuries, but he is not necessarily crucial to the group’s functioning. Many of its decisions are made by local authorities across the Islamic State’s territory. It also doesn’t even look like Baghdadi is the group’s strategic leader: Recent reports confirm that, as has long been suspected, the key military and strategic decisions are often made by veterans of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and suggest that Baghdadi was even picked as a figurehead, for his religious credentials.

Wounding or killing him would still be a serious blow to the group, of course, but there’s a lot more that would need to be done to extinguish the Islamic State.

UPDATE: Armin Rosen of Business Insider has an interesting post about the town where Baghdadi was supposedly hiding when he was injured. It’s highly remote and easy to defend, but also not far from Kurdish areas, meaning it’s possible Kurdish intelligence efforts could have penetrated the town.