Trump says IS leader dead in US military assault
The shadowy leader of the Islamic State group who presided over its global jihad and became arguably the world's most wanted man, is dead after being targeted by a U.S. military raid in Syria, President Donald Trump said Sunday.
"Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead," Trump announced at the White House, saying the U.S. had "brought the world's number one terrorist leader to justice."
As U.S. forces bore down on him, Trump said al-Baghdadi fled into a "dead-end" tunnel with three of his children and detonated a suicide vest. "He was a sick and depraved man, and now he's gone," Trump said. "He died like a dog, he died like a coward."
A U.S. official told The Associated Press late Saturday that alBaghdadi was targeted in Syria's northwestern Idlib province. No U.S. forces were killed or injured in the raid, Trump said. He added that al-Baghdadi's identity was positively confirmed by a DNA test conducted onsite.
Trump on late Saturday had teased a major announcement, tweeting that "Something very big has just happened!" By the morning, he was thanking Russia, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, as well as Kurdish fighters in Syria for their support.
The killing of al-Baghdadi marks a significant foreign policy success for Trump, coming at one of the lowest points in his presidency as he is mired in impeachment proceedings and facing widespread Republican condemnation for his Syria policy.
The recent pullback of U.S. troops he ordered from northeastern Syria raised a storm of bipartisan criticism in Washington that the militant group could regain strength after it had lost vast stretches of territory it had once controlled. Trump said the troop pullout "had nothing to do with this."
Planning for the operation began two weeks ago, Trump said, after the U.S. gained unspecified intelligence on al-Baghdadi's whereabouts. Eight military helicopters landed at the compound and were met by gunfire, Trump said.
Trump vividly described the raid and took extensive questions from reporters. He said U.S. forces breached the walls of the building because the doors were booby-trapped and chased alBaghdadi into the tunnel, which partially collapsed after al-Baghdadi detonated the suicide vest. Trump said a military dog was injured by the explosive blast.
Trump said he watched the operation from the White House Situation room as it played out live "as though you were watching a movie." He suggested he may order the release of the video so that the world knows alBaghdadi did not die of a hero and spent his final moments "crying, "whimpering" and "screaming."
Trump said he teased the announcement as soon as American forces landed safely in a thirdcountry.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Syria war monitor, reported an attack carried out by a squadron of eight helicopters accompanied by a warplane belonging to the international coalition on positions of the Hurras al-Deen, an al-Qaida-linked group, in the Barisha area north of Idlib city,
after midnight on Saturday. IS operatives were believed to be hiding in the area, it said.
It said the helicopters targeted IS positions with heavy strikes for about 120 minutes, during which jihadists fired at the aircraft with heavy weapons. The Britainbased Observatory, which operates through a network of activists on the ground, documented the death of 9 people as a result of the coalition helicopter attack. It was not immediately known whether al-Baghdadi was one of them, it said.
Al-Baghdadi's presence in the village, a few kilometers from the Turkish border, would come as a surprise, even if some IS leaders are believed to have fled to Idlib after losing their last sliver of territory in Syria to U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in March. The surrounding areas are largely controlled by an IS rival, the alQaida-linked Hayat Tahrir alSham, or HTS, although other jihadi groups sympathetic to IS operate there. Unverified video circulated online by Syrian groups appeared to support the Observatory claim that the operation occurred in Barisha.
Trump said the death of alBaghdadi shows the United States will continue pursuing other terrorist leaders and that none should rest easy. "These savage monsters will not escape their fate," he said and that the "losers" who worked for al-Baghdadi had "no idea what they were getting into."
Kurdish forces appeared ready to portray al-Baghdadi's death as a joint victory for their faltering alliance with the U.S., weeks after Trump ordered American forces to withdraw from northeastern Syria, all but abandoning Washington's allies to a wideranging Turkish assault.
Al-Baghdadi had led IS for the last five years, presiding over its ascendancy as it cultivated a reputation for beheadings and attracted tens of thousands of followers to a sprawling and selfstyled caliphate in Iraq and Syria. He remained among the few IS commanders still at large despite multiple claims in recent years about his death and even as his so-called caliphate dramatically shrank, with many supporters who joined the cause either imprisoned or jailed.
His exhortations were instrumental in inspiring terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe and in the United States. Shifting away from the airline hijackings and other mass-casualty attacks that came to define al-Qaida, alBaghdadi and other IS leaders supported smaller-scale acts of violence that would be harder for law enforcement to prepare for and prevent.
They encouraged jihadists who could not travel to the caliphate to kill where they were, with whatever weapon they had at their disposal. In the U.S., multiple extremists have pledged their allegiance to al-Baghdadi on social media, including a woman who along with her husband committed a 2015 massacre at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California.
With a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head, al-Baghdadi was far less visible in recent years, releasing only sporadic audio recordings, including one just last month in which he called on members of the extremist group to do all they could to free IS detainees and women held in jails and camps.