Biden says top ISIS leader killed in Syria raid
Washington, Feb. 3: President Joe Biden said Thursday a global “terrorist threat” was removed when the head of the Islamic State group blew himself up after US special forces swooped on his Syrian hideout in an “incredibly challenging” nighttime helicopter raid.
“The United States military forces successfully removed a major terrorist threat to the world, the global leader of ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi alQurashi,” Mr Biden said in nationally televised remarks.
The operation dealt the biggest setback to the jihadist IS organisation since Qurashi’s predecessor, the better-known Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a US commando raid in the same Syrian region of Idlib in 2019.
In brief, somber remarks delivered in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, Mr Biden said he ordered an assault by troops, rather than merely bombing the house where the IS leader was located, in order to minimise civilian casualties, even though this meant “much greater risk to our own people”.
The house contained “families, including children” and “as our troops approached to capture the terrorist, in a final act of desperate cowardice, with no regard to the lives of his own family or others in the building, he chose to blow himself up,” Mr Biden said.
Qurashi did not merely set off a suicide vest to kill himself, but detonated the entire “third floor” of the residence in the town of Atme, Mr Biden said, “taking several members of his family with him”.
An Iraqi from the Turkmen-majority city of Tal Afar, Qurashi was also known as Amir Mohammed Said Abd alRahman al-Mawla.