IS leader al-Baghdadi killed after US operation in Syria
ABU Bakr al-Baghdadi – the world’s most wanted man – was believed on Sunday to have been killed in a US special operation in northwest Syria.
The Islamic State (IS) leader was thought to be dead after a US military raid in the Idlib region, US media reported early on Sunday.
A war monitor said US helicopters dropped forces in an area of Idlib where “groups linked to the IS group” were present.
The helicopters targeted a home and a car outside the village of Barisha in an operation that killed nine people including an IS senior leader called Abu Yamaan as well as a child and two women, the Britainbased Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
It was not immediately clear if Baghdadi had been in the area, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.
A resident who gave his name as Abdel Hameed said he rushed to the attack site after he heard helicopters, gunfire and strikes in the night.
“The home had collapsed and next to it there was a destroyed tent and vehicle. There were two people killed inside,” he said.
US media cited multiple government sources as saying Baghdadi may have killed himself with a suicide vest as US special operations forces descended.
He was the target of the secretly planned operation that was approved by US President Donald Trump, officials said according to US media.
Trump earlier tweeted, without explaining: “Something very big has just happened!”
The commander-in-chief of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces who have been fighting IS in Syria said the operation came after “joint intelligence work” with US forces.
“A historic operation is successful as a consequence of joint intelligence work with the United States of America,” he said on Twitter after the news broke.
From the outskirts of Barisha, an inhabitant of a camp for the displaced also heard helicopters followed by what he described as coalition airstrikes.
They “were flying very low, causing great panic among the people,” Ahmed Hassawi said.
The area of the night-time strikes had been cordoned off by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – Syria’s former al-Qaeda affiliate controlling Idlib.
Long pursued by the US-led coalition against IS, Baghdadi has been erroneously reported dead several times in recent years.
Officials told ABC News that biometric work was underway to firm up the identification of those killed in the raid.
In 2014, IS overran large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq and Baghdadi appeared in a video that summer announcing a “caliphate” in regions they controlled.
At the height of IS rule, Baghdadi held sway over millions of people in the cross-border proto-state. It was blamed for the deaths of thousands of civilians and accused of war crimes.
But several offensives in both countries whittled down that territory, and in March the USbacked SDF ousted the extremist group from its last patch of territory in eastern Syria.
Baghdadi – an Iraqi native believed to be around 48 years old – was rarely seen. His death has been erroneously reported on a number of occasions. Most recently, Russian forces said that he had been killed in a 2017 drone strike.
After 2014 he disappeared from sight, only surfacing in a video in April this year with a wiry grey and red beard and an assault rifle at his side, as he encouraged followers to “take revenge” for IS members who had been killed.
His reappearance was seen as a reassertion of his leadership of a group that, while it had lost its physical territory, had spread from the Middle East to Asia and Africa and claimed several deadly attacks in Europe.
But Baghdadi remained on the run. The US State Department posted a $25 million reward for information on his whereabouts.
In September, the group released an audio message said to be from Baghdadi praising the operations of IS affiliates in other regions. It also called on scattered IS fighters to regroup and try to free thousands of their comrades held in jails and camps by the SDF in northeastern Syria.