A video from the Islamic State group broadcast on April 29 shows its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an undisclosed location. (Al-Furqan Media/Afp Via Getty Im)
A video from the Islamic State group broadcast on April 29 shows its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an undisclosed location. (Al-Furqan Media/Afp Via Getty Im)
By
Missy Ryan and
Dan Lamothe
Oct. 27, 2019 at 8:57 a.m. EDT
The Trump administration launched a military operation in Syria targeting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the elusive leader of the Islamic State, officials said late Saturday.
Special Operations forces conducted a raid in northwest Syria’s Idlib province aimed at the militant leader, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss activities that have not yet been made public.
Individuals familiar with the operation said Baghdadi, who managed to evade a prolonged U.S. and allied campaign to locate him, was believed to be dead. But the militant leader has been reported dead or wounded multiple times before.
President Trump was expected to make an announcement at 9 a.m. “Something very big has just happened!” the president tweeted on Saturday night.
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If confirmed, Baghdadi’s death would bring a dramatic end to a years-long hunt for the man who spearheaded the Islamic State’s transformation from an underground insurgent band to a powerful quasi-state that straddled two countries and spawned copycat movements across continents.
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The operation targeting Baghdadi was first reported by Newsweek. The U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State referred all queries about the operation to the Pentagon, which did not respond to requests for comment.
On Sunday, a number of U.S. allies in the region said they were involved in gathering the intelligence for the operation.
One official said that, during the operation, an individual believed to be the militant leader appeared to have detonated an explosive vest and killed himself. Officials said they were now seeking to verify whether that person was in fact Baghdadi.
America’s allies in the region were quick to suggest they were involved in the operation, with the Iraqis in particular saying they provided key intelligence to finding the reclusive insurgent leader.
A senior official from Iraq’s intelligence service, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the arrests and interrogation of a number of people close to Baghdadi yielded up his location, which they then gave to the Americans. He confirmed the location raided Saturday was the one his service had discovered.
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Meanwhile, the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces — long time U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State — indicated that they too had provided intelligence for the operation.
“For five months there has been joint intel cooperation on the ground and accurate monitoring, until we achieved a joint operation to kill Abu Bakir al-Bagdadi,” its commander, Gen. Mazloum Abdi tweeted.
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His spokesman, Mustafa Bali, followed up in a tweet of his own explicitly stating its involvement.
“Successful and effective operation by our forces is yet another proof of SDF’s anti-terror capability. We continue to work with our partners in the global @coalition in the fight against ISIS terrorism,” he tweeted, referring to the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces.
Trump has recently been accused of abandoning the Kurds following a decision to pull back most of the U.S. forces in northern Syria that had provided a deterrent against the Turks across the border.
A Syrian man inspects the site of helicopter gunfire which reportedly killed nine people near the northwestern Syrian village of Barisha in the Idlib province along the border with Turkey on October 27, 2019, where “groups linked to the Islamic State group” were present. (Omar Haj Kadour/Afp Via Getty Images)
A Syrian man inspects the site of helicopter gunfire which reportedly killed nine people near the northwestern Syrian village of Barisha in the Idlib province along the border with Turkey on October 27, 2019, where “groups linked to the Islamic State group” were present. (Omar Haj Kadour/Afp Via Getty Images)
A senior Turkish official said that “to the best of my knowledge” Baghdadi had arrived at the location where the raid occurred 48 hours before the U.S. military operation. The official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said Turkey’s military had been informed of the raid in advance but declined to say whether Ankara had shared intelligence that led to the operation, or whether Baghdadi was dead.
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Iraq’s state-run Iraqiyah TV channel broadcast footage of what it called the aftermath of the attack, showing a rocky area marked by a crater and a pile of clothes on the ground, as well as a distant nighttime blast it said was the attack itself.
The Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, which at its largest stretched across much of Iraq and Syria, has been largely destroyed following years of assaults by U.S., Syrian, Iraqi, European and other forces. But officials believe that the organization remains a formidable threat determined to regain strength.
While Baghdadi, a native of the Iraqi city of Samarra believed to be in his mid-40s, has remained a reclusive figure even to his followers, he urged militants in an audio message issued last month to conduct attacks against security forces and to attempt to break imprisoned brethren out of jail.
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The raid comes as the United States scrambles to adjust its posture in Syria in the wake of Trump’s decision to curtail the U.S. military mission. Trump said earlier this month he would pull out nearly all of the approximately 1,000 troops in Syria amid a Turkish offensive against Syrian Kurdish troops who have been the Pentagon’s main battlefield partner there, but evolving plans now call for a larger residual force that could mean a substantial ongoing campaign.
Pentagon officials have warned that the Islamic State could use the further upheaval in Syria as an opportunity to stage a comeback. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper last week acknowledged that more than 100 fighters had escaped from Kurdish-run prisons.
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According to Javed Ali, a former White House senior director for counterterrorism, the death of Baghdadi would be a “huge blow.” But, like the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces in 2011, it “will not lead to strategic defeat,” he said. Ali noted that ISIS has proved resilient despite the physical loss of its caliphate. “That's something we learned in the aftermath of the bin Laden raid,” another high-risk mission.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appearing at a mosque in Iraq's second city, Mosul, according to a video recording posted on the Internet on July 5, 2014. (Reuters Tv/Reuters)
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appearing at a mosque in Iraq's second city, Mosul, according to a video recording posted on the Internet on July 5, 2014. (Reuters Tv/Reuters)
The raid targeting Baghdadi took place outside of the area where the U.S. military, which began airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Syria in 2014 and established a ground mission the following year, has focused its campaign in recent years. But there have been occasional U.S. attacks on militant targets in Idlib, including an airstrike last month.
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While Idlib, the only province held by the opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after eight years of war, is controlled by a patchwork of rebel groups, the dominant military power is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which is loosely tied to al-Qaeda.
Syrian rebels ejected the Islamic State from Idlib in 2014, but in recent months fleeing Islamic State members have been showing up in the province. Some have been caught and executed by HTS, a fierce rival of the Islamic State.
Liz Sly in Los Angeles, Souad Mekhennet in Germany, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Kareem Fahim in Istanbul, Mustafa Salim in Baghdad and Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.
