Trump Approved Raid on ISIS Leader in Syria’s Rebel-Held Idlib, Military Says He’s Dead

The United States military has conducted a special operations raid targeting one of its most high-value targets, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), Newsweek has learned. President Donald Trump approved the mission nearly a week before it took place.

Amid reports Saturday of U.S. military helicopters over the Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, a senior Pentagon official familiar with the operation and Army official briefed on the matter told Newsweek that Baghdadi was the target of the top-secret operation in the last bastion of the country’s Islamist-dominated opposition, a faction that has clashed with ISIS in recent years.

So this is how Baghdadi op happened;
• US forces with choppers from Turkey’s Incirlik land in Bashira around 00:40
• Arabic speaking soldier asked civilians to leave
• 3 men, 3 women, one child died
• Compound destroyed after the op

— AJ Arabicpic.twitter.com/zgLV5vVUgr

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) October 27, 2019

A U.S. Army official briefed on the results of the operation told Newsweek that Baghdadi was killed in the raid, and the Defense Department told the White House they have “high confidence” that the high-value target killed was Baghdadi, but further verification is pending DNA and biometric testing. The senior Pentagon official said there was a brief firefight when U.S. forces entered the compound in Idlib’s Barisha village and that Baghdadi then killed himself by detonating a suicide vest. Family members were present. According to Pentagon sources, no children were harmed in the raid but two Baghdadi wives were killed after detonating their own explosive vests.

Something very big has just happened!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2019

Members of the Joint Special Operations Command’s Delta Team carried out Saturday’s high-level operation after receiving actionable intelligence, according to sources familiar with the operation. The location raided by special operations troops had been under surveillance for some time.

The senior Pentagon official told Newsweek that the compound in which Baghdadi was located was then taken out with an airstrike in order to prevent the site from becoming a shrine to the leader. [Which is idiotic, Islamist fundamentalist are the last people in the world to have “shrines” for dead people which is idolatry to them.] Turkey, a NATO ally backing local insurgents, was not notified prior to the operation, the official said.

https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1188375272455917568

On Saturday night, after the operation had concluded, President Trump tweeted: “Something very big has just happened!” The White House announced later that the president will make a “major statement” Sunday at 9:00 a.m.

Baghdadi, an Iraqi national, is an ultraconservative cleric who became active in the Islamist insurgency against U.S. forces following the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He was held by U.S. forces in the detention centers of Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, where a number of future jihadi leaders rubbed shoulders while in military custody.

He went on to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq, rising up the ranks of the violent group as it merged with others to form the Islamic State of Iraq and eventually inherited its leadership in 2010, when his predecessor was killed in a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation. As the group took advantage of a U.S. military exit to further expand, he renamed the group to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham—or the Levant—better known as ISIS, in 2013, seeking to expand to neighboring Syria, where a civil war was raging.

Baghdadi’s forces made lightning gains across both Iraq and Syria, and in 2014 he declared his group a global caliphate from the Grand Al-Nuri Mosque in Iraq’s second city of Mosul in his only known public appearance as ISIS leader. Officially known from then on simply as the Islamic State, the group began to grab world attention not only for atrocities committed across the region, but in high-profile strikes on civilians in the West as well.

The United States involved itself in Syria by backing groups trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in an uprising also supported by Turkey and other regional powers. The Pentagon began to realign itself by partnering with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces as ISIS grew increasingly powerful, Islamists overtook the opposition and Russia joined Iran in backing Assad against these factions.

Rival campaigns led by the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Force were launched to defeat ISIS, which began to lash out abroad with bloody attacks in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and beyond. The perpetrators of at least three mass killings in the U.S. professed their allegiance to ISIS.

The group began to lose ground in both Iraq and Syria in recent years, however, with a U.S.-led coalition, Iran and Russia among the international powers hunting for Baghdadi. Though various, conflicting reports have been offered as to his fate and whereabouts, no single government has acknowledged any concrete information.

The most persistent of these reports involved him being in the so-called Jazeera region. Once a hotbed for ISIS activities, the area was often described as being in poor health condition. The region was seized by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces—yet Baghdadi was nowhere to be seen.

“Baghdadi being in Syria follows his presumed pattern of life operating between Iraq and Syria,” a former senior counterterrorism official, who has tracked and supported the capture of operatives traveling from Pakistan to Iraq and Turkey, told Newsweek. “If he is dead, that would be a tremendous blow to ISIS, especially if other seniors leaders were killed during this operation.”

As recent as February, Vice-Admiral Igor Kostyukov, head of the Russian general staff’s Main Intelligence Department, told the state-run Tass news agency that Baghdadi’s “whereabouts are unknown,” but “he is definitely not in Idlib.” The site is the base of operations for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a rival jihadi group with ties to Al-Qaeda’s former Nusra Front, headed by Baghdadi’s former associate, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who refused to join ISIS in a move that created a major rift among the militant groups.

Here is another aftermath video from ISIS leader Baghdadi operation pic.twitter.com/Uwfx0hS8UB

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) October 27, 2019

Assad himself was seen on a rare visit to the frontlines of Idlib province in footage released Monday. The Syrian leader told his troops “that the Idlib battle is the core to decisively end chaos and terrorism in all of Syria” and vowed to defeat the array of rebel groups there while also teaming up with Kurdish-led forces against any Turkish-led attempts to push further into northern Syria.

Facing nationwide defeats at the hands of the government and its allies, a number of Syrian rebel groups have opted to reorganize themselves with the support of Turkey. Ankara has mobilized these fighters to battle the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the main component of the Syrian Democratic Forces, considered a terrorist organization by Turkey due to alleged links to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Though Trump has withdrawn U.S. Special Forces from northern Syria, he has called for some troops to remain elsewhere in eastern Syria, where much of the country’s oil reserves remain under Kurdish-led control. A convoy of U.S. military vehicles was seen rolling through the city of Qamishli on its way to eastern Deir Ezzor province.

Turkey has since halted its incursion following back-to-back deals with the U.S. and Russia, which has sought to restore Assad’s authority at the country’s northern border and facilitate a YPG withdrawal. This process remains ongoing, though reports remain of sporadic violence between the two factions, something that some critics of the U.S. exit worried may give ISIS a chance to resurge.

Asked how Baghdadi’s death may affect the U.S. withdrawal, the former senior counterterrorism official told Newsweek, “If you are leaving you want to try to find your targets before you leave.”

Why did US target ISIS leader Al/Baghdadi NOW?

• American official: Senior military leaders decided that commandos should quickly kill or capture Senior terrorists before the completion of US withdrawal from Syria
• US was concerned that it could lose ability to do so

— NYT

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) October 27, 2019

So, this information implies that US officials had intelligence on the whereabouts of Baghdadi for a time and didn’t act on it until they were ordered to withdraw from Syria?

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) October 27, 2019

The Joint Special Operations Command, out of U.S. Army base Fort Bragg in North Carolina, is a sub-unified command of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Led by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Scott A. Howell, the command oversees special mission units such as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group and 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, known to the public as SEAL Team Six⁠—involved in the May 2011 raid that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden⁠—and Delta Force, respectively.

Contacted by Newsweek, no reply was returned before publication from neither the National Security Council nor the Department of Defense.

Source: Newsweek

Trump thanks for #Baghdadi operation:

Nations of:
1- Russia
2- Syria (Assad)
3- Iraq
4- Turkey

He then thanks SDF for helping in operation. Then US intel and military.

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) October 27, 2019

“Russia was great, Iraq was excellent” – Trump

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) October 27, 2019

“Turkey was not a problem … we flew very low and very fast”

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) October 27, 2019

Russia treated us great. We had to fly over Russia held areas. Iraq was excellent.

ISIS fighters are hated as much by Russians as they are hated by us, which is why I think that they can do much of the rest.

— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) October 27, 2019

Many of the people died on the site. But we have taken some alive. The children were left – more dead than alive.

Only American forces but we were given great cooperation. The Russians were very curious but very cooperative.

— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) October 27, 2019

https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/1188458020054790144