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ISIS Names New Leader and Confirms al-Baghdadi’s Death

Almost nothing is known about the new leader of the Islamic State, including who he really is. The group’s announcement also warned America not to be happy.

By Rukmini Callimachi and Eric Schmitt | Published October 31, 2019 Updated 4:51 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 31, 2019 |

Days after the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his heir apparent were killed in back-to-back attacks by United States forces in northern Syria, the group broke its silence on Thursday to confirm their deaths, announce a new leader and warn America: “Do not be happy.”

In an audio recording uploaded on the Telegram app, the Islamic State mourned the loss of Mr. al-Baghdadi, who led the organization for nearly a decade, and its spokesman, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, who was killed a day after Mr. al-Baghdadi and who had widely been considered a potential successor.

The audio recording was the first word from the Islamic State confirming the death of its leader, which President Trump triumphantly announced on Sunday as a huge blow to the world’s most fearsome terrorist group.

Mr. Trump and Pentagon officials said Mr. al-Baghdadi had blown himself up with a suicide vest, also killing two children, after he had been cornered on Saturday in a dead-end tunnel during an American military raid in a northern Syrian village. Mr. al-Muhajir was killed on Sunday in an airstrike elsewhere in northern Syria.

Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death came eight months after American-led forces in Syria seized the last remnants of the territory once held by the Islamic State, which at its height spanned an area the size of Britain across parts of Syria and Iraq.

The Islamic State announcement said that Mr. al-Baghdadi had been succeeded as leader by Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi, whom it identified as the “emir of the believers” and “caliph.”

Almost nothing is publicly known about Mr. al-Qurayshi, including his real name, and counterterrorism analysts were scrambling Thursday to try to figure out who he is.

“Nobody — and I mean nobody outside a likely very small circle within ISIS — have any idea who their new leader ‘Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi’ is,” Paul Cruickshank, editor of the CTC Sentinel at the Combating Terrorism Center, said in a tweet on Thursday. “The group has not yet released any meaningful biographical details which might allow analysts to pinpoint his identity.”

Daniele Raineri, a journalist and analyst who has been studying the Islamic State’s leadership structure for more than a decade, said that ISIS leaders often acquire a new nom de guerre with the appointment to a new position, meaning Mr. al-Qurayshi may have had a completely different name last week.

The al-Qurayshi appellation at the end of his name indicates that he is being portrayed as a descendant of the Quraysh tribe of the Prophet Muhammad, a lineage that the Islamic State considers to be a prerequisite for becoming a caliph, or ruler of a Muslim theocracy.

Its use indicates that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, continues to see itself as a caliphate — even if one with practically no territory.

“It shows that while the world is ready to pronounce the Islamic State dead and finished, the group’s core leadership continues to believe it can operate much as it has in the past,” said Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization in New York.

“The suggestion is that nothing changes, allegiance should still be to the leadership, and affiliates and franchises should continue to look to al-Qurayshi for guidance on how to operate,” he said.

The announcement, in a seven-minute, 37-second recording, was coupled with a warning to the United States not to gloat over killing Mr. al-Baghdadi, who oversaw beheadings of American hostages and other atrocities.

“Do not be happy America, for the death of Sheikh al-Baghdadi, and do not forget the cups of death at his hands, may God accept him,” the announcement said.

It boasted of the group’s disciples and expansion beyond the Middle East, even as its core territory in Iraq and Syria was reduced to nil: “Don’t you see America that the State is now on the threshold of Europe and Central Africa?”

Records of wire transfers and the testimony of captured fighters in the Democratic Republic of Congo indicate that ISIS has set up a base of operation in the Central African country.

The announcement also took aim at the leadership of Mr. Trump, admonishing the United States: “Don’t you see how you became the laughingstock of the nations, and an old and crazy man controls your fate, whose opinion changes between morning and evening?”

The announcement implied that the Islamic State hierarchy had convened in order to discuss the successor question and suggested that he had been handpicked in advance by Mr. al-Baghdadi: “The sheikhs of the mujahedeen agreed, after consulting with their brothers and acting upon the recommendation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to pledge allegiance to the sheikh and mujahid, the scholar, doer and worshiper Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi,” the announcement said.

Devorah Margolin, a senior research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism, said that the fact a shura, or governing council, had selected the new leader “shows the ISIS bureaucracy is still in place. “ She added: “We should not underestimate them.”

The announcement also called upon supporters to pledge allegiance to the new leader, a ritual that took new meaning under Mr. al-Baghdadi’s reign, as attackers around the world recorded video pledges of fealty to the caliph before carrying out killings.

Counterterrorism officials said to expect in the coming weeks a string of videos pledging allegiance from ISIS affiliates in Afghanistan, Sinai, the Philippines and other far-flung insurgent hot spots.

“This will possibly be followed by a message from the new leader,” said Laith Alkouri of the business risk consulting company Flashpoint Global Partners, who monitors the group’s online messages. “He’s inherited the burden of leading the group and he needs to put on a show to maintain the morale of the support base.”

Mr. Clarke added, “This selection of the new leader is a way for ISIS to link its past with the future it will promise its adherents and followers.”

Intelligence officials and analysts were trying to make sense of the announcement and to place the announced successor among the known cadre of the Islamic State. Some speculated that Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi may be a new nom de guerre of Hajji Abdullah, who appears in recently recovered internal Islamic State records archived by Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher.

“It could be to create confusion or for operational security reasons,” said Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The recent announcement by the State Department of a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture was a sign of the importance that the United States placed on him.

Besides the new leader, the Islamic State announcement also proclaimed a new spokesman, identified as Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi, again using a name indicating a lineage from the Prophet’s tribe, and setting up another potential successor.

“Those names are the most generic names I can think of in a long time,” Mr. Raineri said. “This trick is obfuscating on purpose the possible links to people we know.”

Karam Shoumali, Evan Hill and Rick Gladstone contributed reporting.

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Islamic State group names new leader to replace Baghdadi

By Sarah Dadouch, Asser Khattab and Joby Warrick | Published October 31 at 1:09 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 31, 2019 |

BEIRUT — The Islamic State militant group Thursday announced the successor to its former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who U.S. officials said killed himself by detonating a suicide vest during a raid last week on his hiding place in northwest Syria.

A recording released by the Islamic State’s media arm confirmed Baghdadi’s death and named his successor as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qorashi. 

“Do not rejoice, America, in killing Sheikh al-Baghdadi,” a spokesman said on the recording, which was disseminated on the group’s social media channel. “Do you not realize that the [Islamic] State stands today at the doorsteps of Europe and Central Africa? Nay; it is expanding and persisting.”

The new leader was chosen by the Islamic State’s Consultative Council after they had confirmed Baghdadi’s death, the audio statement said. It did not give any details about the new leader but said that a previous spokesman for the group had also been killed in the U.S. raid. 

“Do you not see how you have become the laughingstock of the nations,” it said, addressing the United States, “your destiny ruled by an old fool who goes to sleep with one opinion and wakes with another?”

Baghdadi’s death was widely seen as a blow to the Islamic State, which swept across large areas of Iraq and Syria beginning in June 2014 and eventually took control of territory the size Britain. The group, also referred to as ISIS, terrorized towns it ruled into submission and carried out attacks overseas under the leadership of Baghdadi, an Iraqi national.

Counterterrorism experts said the new leader’s name was possibly a pseudonym, accorded to Baghdadi’s successor at the time of his succession.

With the appointment, the Islamic State appears to be again choosing a figurehead with the scholarly credentials and ancestral lineage that justifies a claim to the title “caliph.” The name “Hashimi” denotes a descendant of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe, to which the prophet Muhammad also belonged. The Islamic State’s official statement also refers to the man as a “scholar.”

Baghdadi, also a claimed descendant of the Banu Hashim clan, was regarded as an Islamic scholar, having studied Islamic jurisprudence at the University of Baghdad and served as an imam. Among the Islamic State’s hard-line adherents, those qualifications gave him standing to claim to be the true “caliph” who could lead the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate.

“We see the group again emphasizing scholarly credentials,” said Cole Bunzel, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute. “It also invoked the example of the first generations of Muslims in describing the selection process for selecting a new caliph. In Sunni Islam, generally speaking, there are two recognized legitimate ways to appoint a new caliph: by designation by the current caliph, or by selection by a group of qualified men. The latter was the case here.”

Mainstream Sunni Muslim authorities have long rejected Baghdadi’s teachings as a perversion of Islam. The Islamic State’s announcement Thursday came amid reminders of the group’s irrelevance to many in the Middle East — at a moment when Arab countries, including Iraq and Lebanon, are gripped with popular, anti-government protests that also explicitly reject appeals to religious sectarianism, a hallmark of the Islamic State.

The Islamic State’s stunning rise began with a lightning advance across territory in northern and western Iraq as the country’s military forces retreated. A U.S.-led campaign to beat back the militants lasted years and relied on Iraqi soldiers and militiamen as well as a Kurdish-led force in Syria. 

Towns and cities occupied by the Islamic State suffered twice: from the militants’ brutal rule, and from what human rights groups said was a frequently indiscriminate U.S.-led air campaign that killed thousands of civilians and reduced parts of Syrian and Iraqi cities to rubble. 

Even after that campaign, the Islamic State has proved durable, carrying out attacks as Iraq and Syria — weakened by political turmoil or civil war — struggled to respond. Other factors have made the Islamic State’s resurgence more likely, experts said, including the harsh detention conditions of thousands of Sunni Muslims accused of membership in the group or collaborating with the militants.

In Thursday’s recording, the group said it would exact its retribution for the deaths of its members but did not specify how.

Warrick reported from Washington. Kareem Fahim in Istanbul contributed to this report.

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Islamic State vows revenge against U.S. for Baghdadi killing

By Hesham Abdulkhalek, Ulf Laessing | Published October 31, 2019, 11:38 AM ET | Reuters | Posted October 31, 2019 |

CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamic State confirmed on Thursday that its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a weekend raid by U.S. special forces in northwestern Syria, and vowed revenge against the United States.

The Iraqi rose from obscurity to lead the ultra-hardline group and declare himself “caliph” of all Muslims, holding sway over huge areas of Iraq and Syria from 2014-2017 before Islamic State’s control disintegrated under U.S.-led attacks.

The group confirmed his death in an audio tape posted online and said a successor, identified as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi, had been appointed.

Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher at Swansea University focusing on Islamic State, said the name was unknown but could refer to a leading figure in Islamic State called Hajj Abdullah, whom the U.S. State Department had identified as a possible successor.

A former senior figure in the rival Islamist group al Qaeda in Iraq, he is also known as Mohamed Said Abdelrahman al-Mawla.

Analysts have also named the Saudi Abu Abdullah al-Jizrawi and Abdullah Qaradash, an Iraqi and one of Baghdadi’s right-hand men, as potential successors along with the Tunisian Abu Othman al-Tunisi.

An Islamic State spokesman warned the United States in the tape to “beware vengeance (against) their nation and their brethren of infidels and apostates”.

Baghdadi’s death is likely to cause Islamic State to splinter, leaving whoever emerges as its new leader with the task of pulling the group back together as a fighting force, according to analysts.

Whether the loss of its leader will in itself affect the group’s capabilities is open to debate. Even if it does face difficulties in the transition, the underlying ideology and the sectarian hatred it promoted remain attractive to many, analysts say.

GUERRILLA ATTACKS

Islamic State also confirmed the death of its spokesman Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir.

“I think they’re trying to send the message, ‘Don’t think you’ve destroyed the project just because you’ve killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the official spokesman’,” Tamimi said.

Islamic State has resorted to guerrilla attacks since losing its last significant piece of territory in Syria in March.

Since Baghdadi’s death, it has posted dozens of claims of responsibility for attacks in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

H.A. Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International peace, said the group, also known as ISIS or Daesh, would have picked the name Quraishi for Baghdadi’s successor to suggest descent from the Prophet Mohammad’s tribe.

Baghdadi’s “caliph” name also ended in Quraishi.

“ISIS is trying to show its followers it respects that tradition, but Muslims more widely aren’t likely to care very much, considering the wide violations of Islamic law that ISIS has clearly engaged with,” Hellyer added.

In his last purported audio message, released in September, Baghdadi said operations were taking place daily and urged freedom for women jailed in Iraq and Syria on suspicion of links to the group.

He also said the United States and its proxies had been defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the United States had been “dragged” into Mali and Niger.

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Islamic State group announces successor to al-Baghdadi

By Associated Press | Published October 31, 2019 | AP | Posted October 31, 2019 |

BEIRUT (AP) — The Islamic State group declared a new leader Thursday after it confirmed the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi days earlier in a U.S raid in Syria.

In its audio release by the IS central media arm, al-Furqan Foundation, a new spokesman for IS identifies the successor as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi — tracing his lineage, like al-Baghdadi, to the Prophet Muhammad's Quraysh tribe.

It provided no other details about al-Qurayshi and it was not immediately clear who the name was in reference to. The group typically identifies its leaders using noms de guerre that refer to their tribal affiliation and lineage. Those names often change.

The speaker in the audio also confirmed the death of Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, a close aide of al-Baghdadi and a spokesman for the group since 2016.

Al-Muhajir was killed in a joint U.S. operation with Kurdish forces in Jarablus in northern Syria on Sunday, hours after al-Baghdadi blew himself up during a U.S. raid in Syria's northwestern Idlib province.

The killings were a double blow to the extremist group, nearly seven months after its territorial defeat in Syria.

The new spokesman, named Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi, urged followers to pledge allegiance to the new "caliph" and addressed the Americans, saying: "Don't rejoice."

"The Shura Council met immediately after confirming the martyrdom of Sheik Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The leaders of the Mujahedeen agreed after consultation with their brethren and acting according to the will (of al-Baghdadi) they pledged allegiance to Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi as the new leader of the Believers."

The new IS leader is identified as a scholar, a well-known warrior and "emir of war" who has battled American forces and knows "its wars."

"So don't rejoice America for the death of Sheik al-Baghdadi," the speaker said. "Don't you know America that the state (IS) today is at the doorstep of Europe and is in Central Africa? It is also expanding and remaining from east to west." The speaker was referencing the slogan IS used at the height of its successes: "Remaining and expanding."

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Death of ISIS Leader Is Scant Consolation to a Changed France

The Islamic State’s crimes, and the fear they instilled, have long since woven themselves into the fabric of French life.

By Adam Nossiter | Published October 31, 2019, 5:37 AM ET | New York Times | Posted October 31, 2019 |

PARIS — The killing of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was met this week with no outpouring of joy or even relief in France, even though this is the European country that suffered most from his depredations.

The reason is simple: the Islamic State’s crimes, and the fear they instilled in the national psyche, are so ingrained in France that the daily fabric of life has been inexorably altered.

As if proof were needed, within the last month, a former far-right candidate shot two Muslims who stopped him from burning down a mosque. A Muslim mother was reprimanded by an official for wearing a head scarf. And President Emmanuel Macron called for a “society of vigilance” after a Muslim employee at Police Headquarters in Paris killed four officers in a knife attack.

These recent symptoms of what some call an ongoing trauma for France demonstrate why Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death was ‘‘no more than a step,” as Mr. Macron put it Sunday in a muted reaction to the news.

The demise of the terrorist leader did nothing to heal the wound that the Islamic State opened in French society with the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. Every day, in the persistent mutual fear and suspicion that exists between France and its large, imperfectly integrated Muslim minority, the wound festers.

In a survey published Sunday by IFOP, a respected polling firm, in the Journal du Dimanche, 61 percent of respondents said that Islam was “incompatible with the values of French society,” an increase of 8 percent over February. Nearly 80 percent said they felt that the vaunted French creed of secularism was “in danger,” largely because of Islam.

The wound existed well before the Islamic State attacks of November 2015 at the Bataclan and elsewhere in Paris. But the massacres perpetrated by al-Baghdadi’s foot soldiers — roughly 1,700 French citizens joined the Islamic State, of whom perhaps 700 were fighters — exacerbated the split between France and its Muslims.

The massacres also amplified the scope of judicial and police control over French society, and created a far more receptive climate for tough police repression. That was evident in this year’s gloves-off handling of the Yellow Vest protesters, which was largely accepted by the French despite thousands of wounded.

There is dispute in France about the extent of the civil liberties rollback since the terrorist attacks. A prominent constitutional lawyer and sometime-adviser to Mr. Macron, François Sureau, published a much-discussed pamphlet last month in which he lamented the “crumbling of the legal edifice of liberties” in France, partly because of 2015.

Other experts call this an exaggeration.

But there is no doubt that the mood has remained tense since Mr. al-Baghdadi unleashed his agents on France four years ago. There are few calls for the state to lighten its grip. The attack of November 2015, in which 131 died, changed France, and the country’s leaders have benefited from popular recognition that new circumstances required new methods.

“It’s clear that it had an extremely powerful traumatic effect, which has inserted itself into the debate associated with Islam in France,” said Zaki Laïdi, a political scientist at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, who was an adviser to France’s then-prime minister, Manuel Valls, at the time of the attacks.

Another adviser to Mr. Valls at the time, Chloe Morin, now at the IPSOS polling firm, said, “There’s a diminished tolerance toward Muslims now.”

But the attacks only exacerbated an already troubled relationship between France and its Muslim population, nearly all agree.

“The attacks heightened this climate of fear regarding Islam,” said Tareq Oubrou, an imam in Bordeaux who is a leading proponent of a reformist strain of Islam. “The ordinary citizen makes no distinction between terrorism, Islamism and sectarianism,” he said.

The existing difficulties, pre-2015, between France and French Muslims were “considerably amplified by the wound that France suffered, of course,” said Mr. Laïdi.

“It was a massive shock, this huge eruption of the Islamist presence,” he said.

In the prime minister’s office, “they said to themselves, ‘How will the country manage this shock?’” Ms. Morin recalled.

The government they both served quickly imposed a state of emergency.

It survives in part to this day, codified permanently in French law by Mr. Macron — the very measures deplored by civil libertarian jurists like Mr. Sureau.

The most notable of these measures allow for expanded and renewable house arrests of persons under suspicion, searches without judicial warrant, and the imposition of electronic bracelets. Mr. Sureau, in his pamphlet, wrote that “the state of emergency was 6,000 searches for 40 arrests, of which 20 were for excusing terrorism.”

But there was little sustained opposition to the new measures, either when they were first imposed or later enacted into law.

Mr. Laïdi observed that “the immense majority of French don’t feel that their civil liberties are threatened” — and the evidence for that is the stillborn debate over the harshness of police tactics in response to the violent Yellow Vest demonstrations. Scattered protests led to nothing.

Mr. Sureau, the lawyer, himself won several important appeals of emergency measures at France’s Constitutional Council, the equivalent of the Supreme Court, including one that criminalized looking at “terrorist” websites — proving, in the eyes of his critics, that civil liberties in the country are in good shape.

“Historically, the French demand protection from the state,” said Mr. Laïdi. “The attacks only reinforced that expectation.”

Yet the muted reactions in France to two recent policy balloons floated by Mr. Macron show that despite the attacks of 2015, the French are not ready to tighten the screws further and become a full-bore national security state.

Mr. Macron issued his call for a “society of vigilance” after the October killings at Paris Police Headquarters, enjoining the French to be “on the lookout at school, at work, in places of worship, close to home” for signs of radicalization among fellow citizens.

The idea fell flat and there has been no follow-up.

For the French elites, Ms. Morin of IPSOS observed, it sounded too much as though the president was calling on citizens to snoop on and denounce one another. For some, the chief of state appeared to be renouncing a traditional government role in France, providing protection.

Vexed by the sharp rise in asylum seekers, Mr. Macron earlier had sounded a warning about immigration, in a speech to members of his own party.

“Are we to be the bourgeois party, or what?” Mr. Macron asked. “The bourgeois don’t have to deal with immigration. It’s the poorer districts that are on the receiving end,” he said. “We don’t have the right not to look this issue in the face.”

Again, public reaction was unenthusiastic to what was seen in his own party as the equivalent of harsh, far-right rhetoric on immigration.

For some political analysts, the legacy of 2015 is mixed: heightened public awareness of risks, but unwillingness to forsake traditional French liberties.

“There was a consciousness-raising,” said Mr. Laïdi of Sciences Po. “But there’s no xenophobia,” he said. “French society is extremely attached to individual liberty.”

With Baghdadi in their sights, U.S. troops launched a ‘dangerous and daring nighttime raid’

By Dan Lamothe and Ellen Nakashima | Published October 27 at 8:35 PM ET |

Washington Post | Posted October 28, 2019 |

As President Trump and senior advisers settled into the Situation Room on Saturday evening, elite U.S. forces more than 6,000 miles away launched one of the most significant counterterrorism operations in the campaign against the Islamic State.

Taking off in eight helicopters from Iraq, the troops flew over hostile territory for hundreds of miles in the early Sunday morning darkness.

Their target, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the brutal founder and leader of the Islamic State, was holed up in a compound in northwestern Syria with family members and terrorist associates, and the United States had been watching him for days.

And it was a tip from a disaffected Islamic State militant that set the operation in motion, according to a U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive operation.

What followed was what Trump called a “dangerous and daring nighttime raid” that was carried off “in grand style.” It ended, he said, with Baghdadi fleeing from advancing U.S. forces into a dead-end tunnel and detonating a suicide vest, killing himself and three of his children.

“He didn’t die a hero. He died a coward,” the president said. “Crying, whimpering, screaming and bringing kids with him to die. Certain death.”

Other U.S. officials declined to describe Baghdadi’s state in his last moments.

The disaffected ISIS member had become an informant for Kurdish forces working with the Americans, the official said. And he provided critical information on Baghdadi’s whereabouts.

The informant emerged in early summer, and over time U.S. officials became more confident in his credibility and reliability, the official said. Within the past couple of weeks, it became clear that, when put together with other information, the tip about Baghdadi’s location was solid, the official said.

“It was a montage of a lot of pieces of intelligence that came together with a specific asset that was helpful,” the official said.

How the operation — named after Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker who was abducted and raped repeatedly by Baghdadi before she was killed, according to U.S. officials — came together is still something of a mystery. The troops included some Delta Force members, according to two U.S. officials, but other details, such as how they communicated with more senior commanders in Washington and beyond, and what weapons were involved, remain unknown. 

But in colorful and at times taunting language, Trump revealed details Sunday morning of an operation that marks one of the major victories in the five-year U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State.

The president, speaking at the White House, said he “got to watch” much of the raid beginning about 5 p.m. in Washington. He credited undisclosed technology for giving him “absolutely perfect” visuals that were “as though you were watching a movie.”

Trump, who returned to the White House from golfing at about 4 p.m., entered the Situation Room about an hour later, he said. Seated at a table in a navy suit and blue tie, he was flanked in a photo released by the White House by Vice President Pence, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, White House national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Flying after midnight in the Middle East, the helicopters needed to cross airspace controlled by Iraq, Turkey and Russia, and U.S. officials informed them they had an operation planned without providing details. With the Russians in Syria, the Pentagon has called such communication “deconfliction” and said it has prevented accidents and mistaken intent by adversary forces.

When they arrived, they tried to call Baghdadi out to see if he would surrender, Esper said. A couple of adults and 11 children came out, a U.S. official with knowledge of the operation said.

Baghdadi remained inside, as U.S. officials assumed he might. U.S. forces responded by blowing holes in the side of the compound in an effort to avoid any booby-trapped doors, Trump said. Baghdadi retreated into a tunnel, and then detonated his vest.

Five enemy fighters were killed in the operation in the compound, and others were killed outside, the White House said in a statement. O’Brien, speaking in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said U.S. troops confirmed Baghdadi was dead at 7:15 p.m. in Washington.

“The commander of the mission called and said, ‘100 percent confidence, jackpot. . . . Got him. One hundred percent confidence jackpot, over,’ ” O’Brien said.

Despite Baghdadi's vest detonating, U.S. troops were able to recognize him, the official said. A ground commander reported to Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command, that they were “absolutely convinced” it was the Islamic State leader. McKenzie in turn relayed that message to the White House. The results of the DNA test were complete Sunday morning, the official said.

Milley was “emphatic” that the military had to dispose of Baghdadi’s remains in accordance with Muslim traditions, which typically require burial within 24 hours, the official said. When Navy SEALs killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, his body was buried at sea after traditional Islamic rites were performed. It was not clear Sunday whether that occurred in this case.

The remains of at least two wives were left behind. Trump said they had not detonated their vests and were still wearing them, making it too risky for U.S. troops to dispose of the bodies.

Trump said that one U.S. working dog — described by the president as “beautiful” and “talented” — was wounded after chasing Baghdadi into the tunnel. Trump said that no U.S. troops were injured, but Esper said separately that two service members suffered minor injuries.

“They've already been returned to duty,” Esper said, speaking on CNN's “State of the Union.”

Fewer than 100 U.S. troops were on the ground in the raid, with more involved in a supporting role. Several kinds of aircraft were used in the operation, including CH-47 helicopters, the secretary added. They came under fire early in the mission from “locals in the area,” and the Americans returned fire in self-defense, he said.

Videos circulating on social media Sunday from Barisha appear to depict helicopters flying at low altitudes in the dark, heavy gunfire and occasional explosions. Images taken after daybreak show the home where Baghdadi lived reduced to rubble. Esper said it was deliberately destroyed.

Trump and other U.S. officials credited Syrian Kurdish forces — whose alliance in the battle against the militants the president has recently played down as he withdraws forces from Syria — with providing useful information. Mazloum Abdi, commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, said in a tweet that they had been gathering information about Baghdadi for five months, while Trump said the operation itself started two weeks ago once the United States had him “scoped.”

“We thought he would be in a certain location,” the president said. “He was. Things started checking out very well.”

But it wasn’t clear how long Baghdadi would stay in Barisha, a small village west of Aleppo.

Pence, speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” said the United States received information about Baghdadi’s most recent location early in the week.

“Through a combination of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, we believe we knew where he would be, and by Thursday afternoon were informed that there was a high probability he would be at the compound in Idlib province,” Pence said.

The president directed the military to develop options, and they were presented Friday, Pence said. “Actionable intelligence” obtained Saturday allowed the raid to go forward, he added.

“It was incredible to be in the Situation Room and to see this unfold in real time as our Special Forces were on the ground, to see their professionalism over a period of two hours,” he said. “America and the world are safer today with the leader of ISIS dead.”

Missy Ryan contributed to this report.

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Baghdadi’s death underscores what we’ve lost by abandoning Syria’s Kurds

By Brett McGurk | Published October 27 at 4:43 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 28, 2019 |

Brett McGurk, the Payne distinguished lecturer at Stanford University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, served from 2015 to 2018 as a special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

The killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is great news for the civilized world. The raid deep into northwestern Syria speaks once again to the incredible professionalism of the U.S. Special Forces and the intelligence analysts who help target their operations. The details of this operation speak as well to larger truths about Syria — and to what we have forfeited with the sudden U.S. retreat across its northeast this month.

Baghdadi is not an easily replaceable leader. He claimed unique religious credentials as a Muslim caliph, and his declaration of an Islamic State “caliphate” galvanized tens of thousands of foreign fighters to flood into Syria. His successor will keep the Islamic State alive in Iraq and Syria — the group maintains more than 10,000 fighters there — but after five years of sustained pressure it’s a weakened organization with no remaining territorial hold.

This would be the perfect time to consolidate success and act on what is likely a trove of intelligence pulled from the Baghdadi compound. Our analysts are surely poring over this information now, and it will lead to Islamic State sleeper cells and networks across Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. But our abrupt pullout from Syria will make it harder to act on this information. U.S. Special Forces have already left positions overwatching the Islamic State’s former strongholds, including Raqqa and Manbij, where major attacks into Europe were organized. These areas are now controlled by Russia and the Bashar al-Assad regime, foreclosing our ability to act on targetable information.

Turkey also has some explaining to do. Baghdadi was found not in his traditional areas of eastern Syria or western Iraq, but rather in northwestern Syria — just a few miles from Turkey’s border, and in Idlib province, which has been protected by a dozen Turkish military outposts since early 2018. It is telling that the U.S. military reportedly chose to launch this operation from hundreds of miles away in Iraq, as opposed to facilities in Turkey, a NATO ally, just across the border. The United States also reportedly did not notify Turkey of the raid except when our forces came close to its borders, the same notification we would have provided to adversaries such as Russia and Syria.

Idlib has become the world’s largest terrorist haven. Most of the nearly 40,000 foreign fighters that flooded Syria during its civil war came through Turkey into northwestern Syria. Today, it is largely controlled by al-Qaeda’s formal affiliate in Syria, which itself is sustained by cross-border trade and enjoys symbiotic relationships with Turkey-backed opposition groups. Now we know the area was hospitable enough for the world’s most-wanted terrorist to camp out with his extended family.

This reality remains a serious threat to U.S. national security; unfortunately, our ability to gain information in these areas will depend not on Turkey but on the other allies we have established in Syria, particularly the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). It was not a surprise to hear President Trump confirm that credible information leading to Baghdadi came from the SDF. This has been the case for nearly all similar operations targeting ISIS leaders in Syria.

The United States helped develop the SDF — a force that grew to 60,000 fighters, including Arabs, Kurds and Christians — as the infantry to defeat the Islamic State caliphate because there were no available alternatives. The United States had sought to build a counter-Islamic State force with the support of Turkey, but two administrations found Turkish-backed forces too riddled with extremists to partner with. The SDF over time suffered 11,000 casualties, and with broad support from the local population, enabled U.S. forces to operate in Syria at small numbers, limited risk and low cost.

All that makes clear why the decision to evacuate established positions and permit Turkey to attack the SDF with extremist forces it supports was so strategically backward. It unraveled what had been a stable part of the country, injected new actors into the former Islamic State caliphate that harbor and enable Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and sent hundreds of thousands of mostly Syrian Kurds fleeing for their lives, many toward an already fragile Iraqi Kurdistan region.

The subsequent decision to reconstitute U.S. forces in a remote area with a small oil field under a legally dubious mission to protect it from a reconstituted Islamic State also makes little sense. The mission had been and should have remained to ensure Islamic State cannot reconstitute, not to protect an oil field once it does.

Baghdadi’s death at the end of a dark tunnel may diminish the global appeal of the Islamic State brand. The United States can work with its partners around the world to reinforce this success with law-enforcement raids against Islamic State cells in other countries. On the ground in Syria, however — where the Islamic State is plotting its future — it is now more difficult to consolidate this achievement. U.S. forces have already abandoned populated areas, and the SDF has been forced to turn to Russia as its new partner in cities where only one month ago the United States enjoyed local support, access and intelligence.

Trump deserves full credit for approving the operation that led to Baghdadi’s demise. It’s a shame the information that led to the raid apparently did not come to him before the tragic decision to abruptly pull U.S. Special Forces from much of northeastern Syria. Because everything we already know about the raid reinforces just how valuable, unique and hard-fought the small and sustainable American presence there had been.

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Three big questions that follow the death of Baghdadi

By Ishaan Tharoor | Published October 28 at 12:59 AM ET | Washington Post |

Posted October 28, 2019 |

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In President Trump’s unique vocabulary, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the extremist leader of the Islamic State whom thousands of followers hailed as “caliph,” died “like a dog … whimpering, crying, screaming” beneath a compound in northwestern Syria. Trump shared the news of Baghdadi’s death in a televised announcement from the White House on Sunday morning following a nighttime operation carried out by elite U.S. forces Saturday.

“Last night the United States brought the world’s Number One terrorist leader to justice,” Trump said, referring to the once-obscure religious scholar turned rapist and genocidal warlord. “He was a sick and depraved man, and now he’s gone.”

According to Trump, Baghdadi exploded a suicide vest after being cornered in a dead-end tunnel beneath a compound in Syria’s Idlib province where he and a number of comrades were staying. The U.S. president said that the detonation took the lives of Baghdadi, 48, and three of his children. A White House news release said that no U.S. personnel were lost in the operation, while five “enemy combatants” were killed in the compound and an unspecified number of “additional enemies” were slain in “the vicinity” of Baghdadi’s hideout.

“Trump described a harrowing operation that involved firefights before and after U.S. personnel, ferried under the cover of darkness in eight helicopters, touched down in Idlib,” my colleagues reported. “Officials said the military had taken DNA samples from Baghdadi’s remains and had quickly conducted visual and DNA tests to determine his identity. Nearly a dozen children were removed from the site, the president said. It was not clear where they were taken.”

How did this come about?

The details surrounding the operation are still emerging. According to reporting from my colleagues, “troops from Delta Force, an elite military unit, conducted the operation from a base in Iraq with support from the CIA and Kurdish forces.” Trump said the mission started around two weeks ago, though a leading Syrian Kurdish official claimed that Kurdish forces had been assisting in determining Baghdadi’s whereabouts for the past half a year. A senior official from Iraq’s intelligence service told The Post that arrests and interrogations carried out by Iraqi agents also helped yield Baghdadi’s location.

On Sunday, Trump hailed the work of U.S. intelligence agencies, taking credit for acting on their efforts to track down the militant leader. It marked a departure from his almost routine attacks on the supposed “deep state.” During his presidency, Trump has challenged the conclusions drawn by a host of career national security and intelligence officials on everything from Russian interference in the 2016 elections to the assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi to the White House’s potential abuses of power that are now at the heart of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.

According to the New York Times, the operation to take out Baghdadi was almost derailed by the president’s recent efforts to suddenly pull U.S. forces out of northern Syria. “Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American forces from northern Syria disrupted the meticulous planning and forced Pentagon officials to press ahead with a risky, night raid before their ability to control troops and spies and reconnaissance aircraft disappeared, according to military, intelligence and counterterrorism officials,” noted the Times. “Baghdadi’s death, they said, occurred largely in spite of Trump’s actions.”

Is this a game changer in the war against the Islamic State?

At the time of writing, the Islamic State had not confirmed Baghdadi’s death via its online channels. But his grisly, humiliating demise is at least a symbolic blow for the extremist group, which anchored much of its propaganda on the apocalyptic, messianic allure surrounding Baghdadi. In 2014 he declared the advent of a new Islamic “caliphate” from the pulpit of a historic mosque in the Iraqi city of Mosul and placed himself at the head of a blood-soaked theocratic pseudo-state that slaughtered, enslaved, and brutalized the populations caught under its sway. Half a decade later, though, the Islamic State is no longer a territorial power and exists largely in decentralized cells, scattered across rural towns in Syria and Iraq.

Analysts say these cells are largely autonomous and self-financing and may not suffer much from the decapitation of the organization’s leadership. The past two decades of U.S. covert action against Islamist extremists have seen a parade of militant leaders killed, only for their militant groups to endure. “In the annals of modern counterterrorism so far, what history has shown is these types of strikes do not lead to the strategic collapse or organizational defeat of a terrorism organization,” Javed Ali, a former White House counterterrorism director, told my colleague Liz Sly.

But it raises more questions about the militants’ ability to regroup and remain a threat. “Their recovery has been very slow, their organization is fragile and the killing of Baghdadi is bad timing for them,” Hassan Hassan of the Center for Global Policy told Sly. “Even though they have likely prepared for this moment, it will be hard for them to ensure the organization remains intact.”

Much of what happens next will be dictated by the shifting facts on the ground. As my colleagues reported in 2015, Baghdadi’s rise would have been impossible without the dismantling of the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. A host of jobless, disaffected former Baathist officials made their way into the middle and upper ranks of Baghdadi’s outfit, forming a vanguard that helped the group seize almost a third of Iraq’s territory at its peak. With Syria still under a fog of war and mass political unrest gripping Iraq, the conditions for a revival remain.

What does this mean for Trump’s Syria policy?

From the dais at the White House, Trump thanked governments in Russia, Turkey, Iraq and even the Syrian regime for their tacit cooperation as the United States carried out the raid. He only briefly gestured to the assistance provided by the Syrian Democratic Forces. The Kurdish-led alliance provided the main boots on the ground during American’s campaign against the Islamic State but is also a faction viewed as a terrorist group by Turkey. SDF officials on Sunday claimed they had acted in concert with U.S. forces to also locate and target Baghdadi’s right-hand man and main spokesman in a town along the Turkish border.

Trump seemed more eager to return to his narrative of withdrawal, repeating both his somewhat historically dubious position that the Turks, Kurds and others were doomed to eternal war as well as his unorthodox insistence on “keeping” Middle Eastern oil — in this instance, a deployment of U.S. troops to garrison Syria’s eastern oil fields. “They’ve been fighting for hundreds of years,” Trump said of regional actors. “We’re out. But we are leaving soldiers to secure the oil. And we may have to fight for the oil. It’s okay. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they’ll have a hell of a fight.”

Counterterrorism experts shake their heads at such baldly imperialist posturing at a time when the United States could be consolidating its gains against Baghdadi’s organization. “The mission,” wrote Brett McGurk, a former top U.S. envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, “had been and should have remained to ensure Islamic State cannot reconstitute, not to protect an oil field once it does.”

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Exclusive: Baghdadi's aide was key to his capture - Iraqi intelligence sources

By Ahmed Rasheed | Published October 27, 2019, 6:17 PM | Reuters | Posted October 28, 2019 |

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - In their long hunt for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Iraqi intelligence teams secured a break in February 2018 after one of the Islamic State leader’s top aides gave them information on how he escaped capture for so many years, said two Iraqi security officials.

Baghdadi would sometimes hold strategy talks with his commanders in moving minibuses packed with vegetables in order to avoid detection, Ismael al-Ethawi told officials after he was arrested by Turkish authorities and handed to the Iraqis.

“Ethawi gave valuable information which helped the Iraqi multi-security agencies team complete the missing pieces of the puzzle of Baghdadi’s movements and places he used to hide,” one of the Iraqi security officials said.

“Ethawi gave us details on five men, including him, whom were meeting Baghdadi inside Syria and the different locations they used,” he told Reuters.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Baghdadi died “whimpering and crying” in a raid by U.S. special forces in the Idlib region of northwest Syria.

In a televised address from the White House, Trump said the Islamic State leader died alongside three of his children when he detonated an explosives-laden vest after fleeing into a dead-end tunnel during the attack.

The path to Baghdadi’s demise was full of frustrations for Western and Arab intelligence agencies, who have pored over clues to the whereabouts of a man who imposed a reign of terror across a large swathe of Syria and Iraq, ordering his men to carry out mass executions and beheadings.

He is also responsible for gruesome attacks across five continents in the name of his ultra-fanatic version of Islam.

TURNING POINT

Turning militants such as Ethawi was critical to the agents trying to track Baghdadi.

Ethawi, who holds a PHD in Islamic Sciences, was considered by Iraqi intelligence officials to be one of the leader’s top five aides. He joined al Qaeda in 2006 and was arrested by U.S. forces in 2008 and jailed for four years, according to the Iraqi security officials.

Baghdadi later tasked Ethawi with key roles such as delivering religious instructions and the selection of Islamic State commanders. After the group largely collapsed in 2017, Ethawi fled to Syria with his Syrian wife.

Another turning point came earlier this year during a joint operation in which U.S., Turkish and Iraqi intelligence agents captured senior Islamic State leaders, including four Iraqis and one Syrian, the Iraqi security officials said.

“They gave us all the locations where they were meeting with Baghdadi inside Syria and we decided to coordinate with the CIA to deploy more sources inside these areas,” said one of the Iraqi officials, who has close ties to multiple security agencies.

“In mid-2019 we managed to locate Idlib as the place where Baghdadi was moving from village to village with his family and three close aides,” the official said.

Informants in Syria then spotted an Iraqi man wearing a checkered headdress in an Idlib marketplace and recognized him from a photograph, the official said. It was Ethawi, and they followed him to the home where Baghdadi was staying.

“We passed the details to the CIA and they used a satellite and drones to watch the location for the past five months,” the official said.

Two days ago, Baghdadi left the location with his family for the first time, traveling by minibus to a nearby village.

“There it was his last moment to live,” the official said.

LOCAL ENEMIES

Baghdadi was also on the run from local enemies in Syria.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group formerly known as the Nusra Front and which dominates Idlib, had been mounting its own search for Baghdadi after receiving information he was in the area, according to a commander in an Idlib jihadist group.

The Nusra Front and Islamic State were rivals who fought bloody battles against each other in the Syrian war.

The Nusra Front, founded by Abu Mohamad al-Golani, was al Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria until it broke away from the global jihadist network in 2016.

According to the Idlib commander, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham recently captured another aide to Baghdadi known as Abu Suleiman al-Khalidi, one of three men seen sitting alongside Baghdadi in his last video message.

The capture of Khalidi was “the key” in the search for Baghdadi, the commander said.

His comments raised the possibility that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which locals say is believed to have contacts with Turkish forces in northwest Syria, may have passed on what it learned to other intelligence agencies.

Baghdadi may have concluded that hiding in Idlib was his best hope after Islamic State was all but wiped out in Iraq and Syria. He could have blended in, while lax security and checkpoints operated by armed groups that rarely search vehicles increased his chances of survival, the commander said.

He said Baghdadi was believed to have been in Idlib for about six months, and that his main reason for being there was to try to hide. But he said Baghdadi was still seen as a major threat because his presence would have attracted supporters in an area where Islamic State has sleeper cells.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham fighters raided the town of Sarmin about two months ago after receiving information about Baghdadi being there, but he was not found, according to the commander.

Additional reporting by Khalil Ashawi,

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Despite Baghdadi raid, some analysts question U.S. ability to prevent ISIS resurgence

By Karen DeYoung, Louisa Loveluck and Shane Harris | Published October 27 at 7:53 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 28, 2019 |

The United States is increasingly ill-positioned to prevent a resurgence and expansion of the Islamic State despite the welcome tactical success and symbolic importance of the U.S. raid that eliminated the militant group’s top leader, according to a wide range of regional experts and former defense and intelligence officials.

Senior administration officials hailed the operation that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, following the declared destruction of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq, as evidence that the United States remains determined to eliminate the militant group.

“The important thing is to celebrate the fact that the head, the founder of ISIS is dead. We got him. It signifies our commitment to the enduring defeat of ISIS,” said Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, using another name for the Islamic State.

But the raid came amid rising concern that the diminishing U.S. military and civilian footprint, along with cuts in funding for stabilization and reconstruction, undermines that commitment in a part of the world where U.S. leadership is crucial both to American and global security.

President Trump has repeatedly said that other regional actors should take over the expense and physical presence of the United States in Syria. Last year, Trump cut hundreds of millions of dollars in stabilization aid to areas where U.S. air power and American-advised and assisted Syrian Kurdish ground forces drove the Islamic State out of northern Syria. With the announced departure of U.S. troops in recent weeks, the administration has appeared to encourage the expansion of Turkey and Syrian government forces, along with their Russian allies, into the region.

None of these actors is seen as having the ability or the will to command the international coalition that brought down the caliphate or to lead and equip the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces.

Turkey’s main interest is in replacing the Kurds with Syrian refugees, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is unlikely to address the grievances of his citizens that helped bring the rise of the Islamic State in the first place.

Seth G. Jones , a former adviser to the U.S. Special Operations Command, said the United States “has got to make a choice”: supporting, “directly or indirectly,” the Syrian government in maintaining or taking back territory in the face of an Islamic State resurgence or supporting local actors in doing so.

“The problem is the United States has decided for the moment to do neither,” said Jones, now of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Walking away does not solve this problem.”

There are parts of the world where the United States can play a secondary role in supporting the efforts of other countries to fight terrorist groups, as it has done in West Africa, where France has taken the lead, several experts said.

“At one level, Trump is right in that I would love it if there was another entity willing and capable” of taking on the task of combating the Islamic State in its core area of Syria and Iraq, said William F. Wechsler of the Atlantic Council, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism.

But “there is nobody else in the area that we’re talking about right now,” Wechsler said. If there were, he said, “ISIS would not have emerged in the first place. We are left with this same policy conundrum. As much as we want to hope” that Islamic State resurgence “is not the case, reality and experience tells us otherwise. We’re forced to confront these issues sooner rather than later.”

Russia, which apparently agreed to allow U.S. aircraft conducting the Baghdadi raid to fly through airspace it controls in northwestern Idlib province, “is not an ally of the United States. The president doesn’t believe that. I don’t believe that,” White House national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. But, he added, “when our interests overlap with Russia, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t work with them.”

Russia, however, has shown little interest in a sustained counterterrorism campaign in Syria, even if U.S. policy were to allow Russian dominance in the region.

In a news conference Sunday, SDF spokesman Redur Zelil said operations against the Islamic State would continue and “we will eliminate their sleeper cells across the region.” But the shape of that effort remained unclear.

In addition to monitoring the militants’ remnants across the northeast, the area’s mostly Kurdish administration is responsible for thousands of Islamic State prisoners, many of them foreigners.

In a visit to one of those facilities Sunday, prison guards described for a reporter how security had deteriorated since the Turkish assault. “Half of our guards were transferred to the front line,” said one, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with the news media.

Reports of Baghdadi’s death had yet to reach the inmates, and prisoners inside one cell asked reporters repeatedly for news from the outside. Guards have disconnected their television sets in recent weeks and family visits — where they have been allowed — have been suspended, prison authorities said.

“We don’t want to give them anything that will make them riot,” the guard said.

But intelligence and counterterrorism experts said the U.S. pullout from numerous areas of northern Syria — beyond the encirclement of the oil area held by the SDF far from Kurdish population areas — would make it more difficult to conduct operations like the Baghdadi mission, which depend heavily on human intelligence networks in the country.

The Kurds, who intelligence officials said provided crucial information in locating Baghdadi, have long been a key intelligence-sharing partner, gathering information from their own networks of human sources, current and former intelligence officials said. Trump acknowledged their contributions in his own statement.

But “it takes months, if not years, to perfect the U.S. government’s ability to manhunt in specific, semi-denied areas of operations” like Syria, said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA official with extensive counterterrorism experience overseas who retired this year.

“Fusing reports from our allies, human and signals intelligence and reconnaissance takes time, serious analytical work and patience,” he said. “We will lose this critical edge with a withdrawal of forces.

C.I.A. Got Tip on al-Baghdadi’s Location From Arrest of a Wife and a Courier

President Trump’s abrupt decision to pull forces from northern Syria disrupted planning for the raid and forced the Pentagon to press ahead with a risky night operation, military officials said.

By Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper | Published October 27, 2019 Updated 4:36 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 27, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — The surprising information about the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s general location — in a village deep inside a part of northwestern Syria controlled by rival Qaeda groups — came following the arrest and interrogation of one of Mr. al-Baghdadi’s wives and a courier this past summer, two American officials said.

Armed with that initial tip, the C.I.A. worked closely with Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officials in Iraq and Syria to identify Mr. al-Baghdadi’s more precise whereabouts and to put spies in place to monitor his periodic movements, allowing American commandos to stage an assault Saturday in which President Trump said Mr. al-Baghdadi died.

But Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American forces from northern Syria disrupted the meticulous planning and forced Pentagon officials to press ahead with a risky, night raid before their ability to control troops and spies and reconnaissance aircraft disappeared, according to military, intelligence and counterterrorism officials. Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death, they said, occurred largely in spite of Mr. Trump’s actions.

The officials praised the Kurds, who continued to provide information to the C.I.A. on Mr. al-Baghdadi even after Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the American troops left the Syrian Kurds to confront a Turkish offensive alone. The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country.

The initial planning for the raid began this past summer. The Army’s elite Delta Force commando unit began drawing up and rehearsing plans to conduct a secret mission to kill or capture the ISIS leader, and faced huge hurdles. The location was deep inside territory controlled by Al Qaeda. The skies over that part of the country were controlled by Syria and Russia. The military called off missions at the last minute at least twice.

“It wasn’t until Thursday and then Friday the president chose his option and gave us the green light to proceed as we did yesterday,” Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

Mr. Esper said he did not know if the United States would have been able to carry out the helicopter raid against Mr. Baghdadi’s compound had American troops been completely withdrawn from Syria, as Mr. Trump had originally planned.

“I’d have to consult with our commanders about that,” Mr. Esper said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

In addition to Mr. Trump’s account, more than a half-dozen Pentagon, military, intelligence and counterterrorism officials provided this chronology of the raid after the president approved the operation.

Around midnight Sunday morning — 5 p.m. Saturday in Washington — eight American helicopters, primarily CH-47 Chinooks, took off from a military base near Erbil, Iraq.

Flying low and fast to avoid detection, the helicopters quickly crossed the Syrian border and then flew all the way across Syria itself — a dangerous 70-minute flight in which the helicopters took sporadic groundfire — to the Barisha area just north of Idlib city, in western Syria. Just before landing, the helicopters and other warplanes began firing on a compound of buildings, providing cover for commandos with the Delta Force and their military dogs to descend into a landing zone.



See Where the Raid on al-Baghdadi Took Place in Syria

The compound where the Islamic State leader was said to have died was far from the terrorist group’s former stronghold.

Mr. Trump seemed eager to provide details of the raid during a White House news conference on Sunday.

The president said that with the helicopter gunships firing from above, the commandos bypassed the front door, fearing a booby trap, before destroying one of the compound’s walls. That allowed them to rush through and confront a group of ISIS fighters.

The president, along with Mr. Esper, Vice President Mike Pence, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watched full-motion video of the raid that was piped into the White House Situation Room from surveillance aircraft orbiting over the battlefield.

The Delta Force commandos, under fire, entered the compound, where they shot and killed a number of people. Mr. Trump said they also removed 11 children from harm’s way,

Mr. al-Baghdadi ran into an underground tunnel, with the American commandos in pursuit. Mr. Trump said that the ISIS leader took three children with him, presumably to use as human shields from the American fire. Fearing, apparently correctly, that Mr. al-Baghdadi was wearing a suicide vest, the commandos dispatched a military dog to subdue Mr. al-Baghdadi, Mr. Trump said.

It was then that the Islamic State leader set off the explosives, wounding the dog and killing the three children, Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Esper described the climax of the two-hour ground raid on “This Week” this way: “He’s in a compound, that’s right, with a few other men and women with him and a large number of children. Our special operators have tactics and techniques and procedures they go through to try and call them out. At the end of the day as the president said, he decided to kill himself and took some small children with him, we believe.”

Mr. Trump was more descriptive. “I got to watch much of it,” he said. Mr. al-Baghdadi, he said, “died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” The president said that Mr. Baghdadi “had dragged three of his young children with him,” and that the Islamic State leader “ignited himself, killing himself and the three children.”

Mr. Esper did not repeat the “whimpering” and “crying” assertion made by Mr. Trump. “I don’t have those details,” he said. “The president probably had the opportunity to talk to the commanders on the ground.”

Altogether, the American troops were on the ground in the compound for around two hours, Mr. Trump said, clearing the buildings of fighters and scooping up information that the president said contained important details on ISIS operations. Mr. Trump said the commandos already had DNA samples from the Islamic State leader, which he said they used to make a quick assessment that they had the right man.

Once all the Americans had piled back into their helicopters and started the return flight to Iraq — using the same route out as they used coming in, Mr. Trump said — American warplanes bombed the compound to ensure it was physically destroyed, Mr. Esper said. Just after 9 p.m. Washington time Saturday — four hours after the helicopters took off, “Something very big has just happened!”

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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS Leader Known for His Brutality, Is Dead at 48

President Trump announced the death of al-Baghdadi, who transformed the Islamic State into a global terrorist network that conquered territory the size of Britain and directed horrific attacks in the West.

By Rukmini Callimachi and Falih Hassan | Published October 27, 2019 Updated 5:09 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 27, 2019 | INCREDIBLE PHOTOS |

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the cunning and enigmatic black-clad leader of the Islamic State who transformed a flagging insurgency into a global terrorist network that drew tens of thousands of recruits from 100 countries, has died at 48.

His death was announced on Sunday by President Trump, who said al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest during a raid this weekend in northwestern Syria by United States Special Forces. Mr. Trump said preliminary tests had confirmed his identity.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Islamic State’s media arm, which typically is quick to claim attacks but generally takes longer to confirm the deaths of its leaders.

The son of a pious Sunni family from the Iraqi district of Samarra, al-Baghdadi parlayed religious fervor, hatred of nonbelievers and the power of the internet into the path that catapulted him onto the global stage. He commanded an organization that, at its peak, controlled a territory the size of Britain from which it directed and inspired acts of terror in more than three dozen countries.

Al-Baghdadi was the world’s most-wanted terrorist chieftain, the target of a $25 million bounty from the American government. His death followed a yearslong, international manhunt that consumed the intelligence services of multiple countries and spanned two American presidential administrations.

Al-Baghdadi evaded capture for nearly a decade by hewing to a series of extreme security measures, even when meeting with his most-trusted associates.

“They even made me remove my wristwatch,” recounted Ismail al-Ithawy, a top aide who was captured last year. He spoke from a jail in Iraq, where he has been sentenced to death.

After being stripped of electronic devices, including cellphones and cameras, Mr. al-Ithawy and others recalled, they were blindfolded, loaded onto buses and driven for hours to an unknown location. When they were finally allowed to remove their blindfolds, they would find al-Baghdadi sitting before them.

Meetings lasted between 15 and 30 minutes and the ISIS chief would leave the building first. His visitors were required to stay under armed guard for hours after his exit. Then they were once again blindfolded and driven back to their original point of departure, according to aides who saw him in three of the past five years.

“Baghdadi’s concern was always: Who will betray him? He didn’t trust anyone,” said Gen. Yahya Rasool, a spokesman of the Iraqi Joint Operation Command.

Much of the world first learned of al-Baghdadi in 2014, when his men overran one-third of Iraq and half of neighboring Syria and declared the territory a caliphate, claiming to revive the Muslim theocracy that ended with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The move distinguished the Islamic State from Al Qaeda, the older Islamist terrorist group under whose yoke al-Baghdadi’s men had operated for nearly a decade in Iraq before violently breaking away.

Although Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, had dreamed of restoring the caliphate, he was reluctant to declare one, perhaps fearing the overwhelming military response that eventually cost al-Baghdadi his territory.

Yet it took five years before troops seized in March the last acre of land under al-Baghdadi’s rule. And in the interim, the promise of a physical caliphate electrified tens of thousands of followers who flocked to Syria to serve his imagined state.

At its peak, the group’s black flag flew over major population centers, including the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of 1.4 million.

Its territory spread east into the plains of Nineveh, the biblical city where the extremists turned centuries-old churches into bomb factories. It reached north into the mountains of Sinjar, whose women were singled out for sexual enslavement. It extended south to the Syrian oil fields of Deir al-Zour and the majestic colonnades of Palmyra.

Acting under the orders of a “Delegated Committee” headed by al-Baghdadi, the group known variously as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh imposed its violent interpretation of Islam in these territories. Women accused of adultery were stoned to death, thieves had their hands hacked off, and men who had defied the militants were beheaded.

While some of those medieval punishments are also meted out in places like Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State shocked people around the world by televising its executions. It also offended Muslims by inventing horrific punishments that are not mentioned in Islamic scripture.

A Jordanian pilot was burned alive in a scene filmed by overhead drones. Men accused of being spies were drowned in cages, as underwater cameras captured their last tortured gasp. Others were crushed under the treads of a T-55 tank, or strung up by their feet inside a slaughterhouse and butchered like animals.

But in addition to brutality, the group also meted out services, running a state that was recognized by no one other than themselves, but which in certain categories outperformed the one it had usurped.

The Islamic State collected taxes and saw to it that the garbage was picked up. Couples who got married could expect to receive a marriage license printed on Islamic State stationery. Once children of those unions were born, their birth weight was duly recorded on an ISIS-issued birth certificate. The group even ran its own D.M.V.

For a group intent on re-establishing a theocracy from the Middle Ages, the Islamic State was very much a creature of its time. The militants harnessed the internet to connect with thousands of followers around the globe, making them feel as if they were virtual citizens of the caliphate.

The message of these new jihadists was clear, and many of those on whose ears it fell found it emboldening: Anyone, anywhere, could act in the group’s name. That allowed ISIS to multiply its lethality by remotely inspiring attacks, carried out by men who never set foot in a training camp.

In this fashion, ISIS was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people around the world. A shooting at an office party in San Bernardino, Calif. An attack on a Christmas market in Germany. A truck attack in Nice, France, on Bastille Day. Suicide bombings at churches on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka.

In many instances, the attackers left behind recordings, social media posts or videos pledging allegiance to al-Baghdadi.

“Baghdadi was central to giving voice to ISIS’ project in a manner that achieved startling resonance with vulnerable individuals globally,” said Joshua Geltzer, who was senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council until 2017.

“He will remain a singular figure in the group’s emergence and evolution,” Mr. Geltzer said.

‘SHEIKH IBRAHIM’

Born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi began life in a dry and desolate plain in the village of Al Jallam in central Iraq. He was one of five sons and several daughters of a conservative Sunni man who eked out a living selling sheep.

Neighbors described the family as average, and the area as unremarkable.

But one detail stands out in al-Baghdadi’s early story, and it would later become a key element in his claim to be a caliph or religious ruler: Al Jallam is populated by members of the al-Badri tribe, which traces its lineage to the Quraysh people of the Arabian Peninsula — the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad.

A hereditary connection to the Quraysh is regarded as a prerequisite for becoming a caliph, and pamphlets published by ISIS exhorting Muslims to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi trace his ancestry from the Badri community in Al Jallam to Fatima, the youngest daughter of the prophet.

By the time al-Baghdadi began elementary school, the family had moved to the nearby city of Samarra. He was a mediocre student. His high school transcript shows that his highest grade was in art (95 out of 100), while in core subjects like algebra, he mustered scores in the low 50s.

In interviews with 17 people who knew al-Baghdadi, including friends, classmates, neighbors, teachers and former pupils, he was described as “shy,” “reserved,” “isolated” and “quiet.” He found his place, they said, at the local mosque, where his father enrolled him in a Quranic memorization class.

“Yes, he had a spiritual gift,” said the owner of the Ahmed Ibn Hanbal mosque, Khalid Ahmed Ismael, adding, “His soul was connected to the mosque.”

Mr. Ismael recalled how, without being prompted, al-Baghdadi — a nom de guerre he adopted when he became a militant — would lead the other boys in cleaning the house of worship, dragging the carpets outside, hosing them down and placing them on the roof to dry.

And he quickly outdid the other boys in the memorization and recitation of scripture. By the time he was in high school, congregants began asking for the boy to lead the prayer in the imam’s place.

“That’s how sweet his voice was,” Mr. Ismael said. “It was so sweet that you could feel the sweetness and it would attract others into the mosque.”

But already there were signs that al-Baghdadi saw his conservative approach to faith as one that should be imposed on others.

When a neighbor got a tattoo of a heart on his arm, al-Baghdadi lectured him. Tattoos, the neighbor, Younes Taha, recalled him saying, are forbidden under Islamic law. Soon, he even felt comfortable reproaching his mentors.

“When you stand up and recite the prayer, the smell of your breath will make the angels fly away,” he reportedly told Mr. Ismael when the mosque owner began smoking.

At age 20, in 1991, he enrolled in the Shariah college of Baghdad University, according to school records obtained by The New York Times from Iraq’s intelligence agency.

He earned a bachelor’s degree and then enrolled at Saddam University, an institution dedicated to Islamic studies where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in topics related to Islamic scripture.

To pay for his studies, he taught Quranic classes at al-Haj Zaidan Mosque in the Topchi neighborhood of Baghdad, where his pupils referred to him as “Sheikh Ibrahim.” Those who interacted with him described him as taciturn and reserved, a quality that impressed his students.

“When I asked him, ‘Sheikh Ibrahim, I have a question for you,’ he would answer just the question and nothing more,” said the mosque’s current imam, Ahmed Rajab, who was al-Baghdadi’s pupil in the early 2000s. “We would try to get him to talk to us. He didn’t gossip. His reserve came from his self-discipline.”

But outside the mosque, some began to be bothered by his proselytizing.

On weekends, he coached a youth soccer team, using practices as an opportunity to hand out pamphlets advocating the ultraconservative Wahhabi strain of Islam.

“We were like: ‘Why? We’re here to play soccer.’ I just took it and threw it away,” recalled Faisal Ghazi Taih, one of the former players. His parents pulled him off the team when they found out, he said.

In 2003, as military jets sliced the sky over Baghdad and the American invasion to topple Saddam Hussein began, al-Baghdadi told his students at the mosque in Topchi that he was heading home.

Less than a year later, Mr. Taha was watching TV when he suddenly recognized his former neighbor in footage showing detainees arrested by American forces. They were lined up in orange jumpsuits, the same color that Western hostages of ISIS would later be forced to wear in their execution videos.

Security officials say that al-Baghdadi was arrested near Falluja at the home of his in-laws in January 2004.

The target of the raid was al-Baghdadi’s brother-in-law, who had taken up arms against the American occupation. Al-Baghdadi was swept up in the raid, considered little more than a hanger-on at that point, officials said. He spent 11 months in a detention center at Camp Bucca, according to declassified Pentagon records.

Some analysts have argued that it was his time in American custody that radicalized him. Those who were imprisoned alongside him, however, say he was already committed to violence when he entered the sprawling prison camp.

Talib al-Mayahi, now 54, met al-Baghdadi inside the tent where they were both assigned at Camp Bucca. Al-Baghdadi was in his 30s and went by the nom de guerre “Abu Dua,” recalled his fellow detainee, who is under a form of witness protection in Iraq and was interviewed in the presence of intelligence agents.

The prisoners inside the camp were beginning to organize, appointing secret “emirs” of each tent, Mr. al-Mayahi said, and al-Baghdadi was chosen to lead his. He immediately set to work driving Shiite prisoners from the tent, leaning on a gang of fellow Sunni prisoners, armed with shanks made from the metal mined from the camp’s air-conditioning units, Mr. al-Mayahi said.

Hatred of the Shiites was a hallmark of the insurgency that was sweeping across Iraq. Their places of worship began to be targeted in a move that was criticized even by Al Qaeda. Later, it would become a hallmark of the Islamic State, whose followers began targeting the sect throughout the world, dispatching suicide bombers to Shiite sites in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran and Bangladesh.

“It got to the point where Shiite prisoners would ask to be transferred to another tent,” Mr. al-Mayahi said. “Then when there were no Shiite left, he began threatening fellow Sunnis: Why are you smoking? How come you didn’t show up to prayer? Why is your beard so short?”

THE HUNT

Pentagon records indicate that al-Baghdadi was released in late 2004, a failure of intelligence that would come to haunt American officials.

“It’s hard to imagine we could have had a crystal ball then that would tell us he’d become head of ISIS,” a Pentagon official told The Times a decade later.

For years, he disappeared from view. Then in 2009, security forces recovered a cache of documents in a safe house used by the militants and found the name “Abu Dua” on the group’s personnel list.

His clout inside the terrorist group did not become clear until months later, when security forces captured a senior leader of the insurgency, said Abu Ali al-Basri, the director general of Iraqi intelligence.

At a checkpoint in Baghdad in March of 2010, Iraqi agents arrested Manaf al-Rawi, believed to be one of the executioners of an American contractor, Nick Berg, whose videotaped beheading was posted on the internet. Under interrogation, Mr. al-Rawi named “Abu Dua,” as one of the group’s coordinators, tasked with passing secret messages between the insurgents.

“I directly sent word to the prime minister with the names of three people we deemed important based on the interrogation of Manaf al-Rawi,” Mr. al-Basri said. “One of the three was Baghdadi.”

Not long after, in May of 2010, the insurgents announced their new leader: It was Abu Dua, who now introduced himself to the world as “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

The meaning of the new nom de guerre was not lost on his future followers: Abu Bakr was the first caliph after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in ancient Arabia and is credited with the wave of Islamic expansion that followed.

For the next three years, Mr. al-Basri’s agents hunted al-Baghdadi, setting up at least six stings to arrest him.

There were numerous near-misses, he claims, saying they came close to catching him in the Baghdad district of Mansour, then in Adamiya, where he was spotted driving. On another occasion, they got a tip that he was driving to the town of Ghazaliya to meet with a Qaeda operative.

And in Topchi, near the mosque where his voice used to call the faithful to prayer, they laid an ambush. Somehow, he managed to get away.

“At that point, he was more lucky than he was smart,” Mr. al-Basri said.

But with each close call, al-Baghdadi became more circumspect, more obsessed with security and more untrusting. He is believed to have stopped using cellphones more than a decade ago, relying exclusively on hand-delivered messages, Mr. al-Basri said.

In 2014, when he ascended the marbled pulpit of a mosque in Mosul to declare the caliphate, it was the first time a video appeared that showed his face uncovered.

Al-Baghdadi’s reclusiveness fed rumors of his demise, with many news outlets carrying speculative reports of his death, all of which proved to be untrue. Each time, he resurfaced in audio recordings, and later videos, thumbing his nose at the world.

American officials who worked in the Obama administration say that for all of 2014, 2015 and 2016 there was not a single time when they believed they had solid intelligence about al-Baghdadi’s whereabouts, even as numerous other senior Islamic State leaders were hunted down and killed, including al-Baghdadi’s No. 2.

But unlike Osama bin Laden, al-Baghdadi was no recluse.

Bin Laden walled himself off from the world in a compound in Pakistan in an effort to avoid detection and operated as a distant manager. Al-Baghdadi, by contrast, was directly involved in some of his group’s most notorious atrocities, including the organized rape of women considered to be nonbelievers.

[Read about ISIS’ theology of rape.]

One of them was D, who was just 15 years old when she was kidnapped alongside other Yazidi women and girls from her village at the foot of Mount Sinjar a few weeks after the declaration of the caliphate. Interviewed after her escape, she asked to be identified by only her first initial because of the stigma of rape, and described how the women and girls were transported to a building in Raqqa, which acted as a viewing gallery for the men wishing to enslave them.

The first man to come in was al-Baghdadi, she said, information that was confirmed by two other girls who were held at the same facility.

“I noticed right away that he was important — everybody stood up when he walked in,” D said.

She and the other girls he chose were moved from house to house, eventually ending up in the same villa as 26-year-old American aid worker Kayla Mueller of Prescott, Ariz. All of them were taken out and raped by al-Baghdadi, including Ms. Mueller, who returned to their shared room sobbing unconsolably, according to the account of survivors that was confirmed by American officials and Ms. Mueller’s mother.

Al-Baghdadi took pleasure in brutality, the women held captive said.

One day in August 2014, D was summoned to see him. Fearing she was about to be raped again, she was surprised when al-Baghdadi took her into the living room, not the bedroom, and asked her to sit next to him on a couch.

“He had a big, black laptop,” she said, recalling how he hit “play” on a video on the screen. It showed the execution of an American journalist, James Foley.

“He told us, ‘We killed this man today,’” she said. “He was laughing at our reaction.”

Some who knew al-Baghdadi the longest wondered if it was his very nature that accounted for his ability to evade capture for so long, and not just his extreme security measures.

Hussam Mehdi, an ISIS member who first met al-Baghdadi at Camp Bucca and is now in jail in Baghdad, said his enduring memory of the man who would become one of the world’s most powerful terrorists was of him walking back and forth along the fence line — by himself.

“It’s something I have wondered about: a man who was totally alone, a person who doesn’t socialize, just ‘salaam alaikum,’ and then moves on,” Mr. Mehdi said. “I wonder if it’s because he likes to be alone that isolation came easily to him.”

Mr. Mehdi thought back to the men who had come before al-Baghdadi at the helm of the Islamic State.

“Abu Musab was killed,” he said. “Abu Omar was killed. But Abu Bakr lasted.”

Rukmini Callimachi reported on this obituary from Samarra, Al Jallam and Baghdad, Iraq, between late 2018 and early 2019. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

*********

ISIS Leader al-Baghdadi Is Dead, Trump Says

President Trump said in a nationally televised address that American forces targeted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State, in an operation in Syria this weekend.

By Peter Baker, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper | Published October 27, 2019 Updated 7:22 PM ET | New York Times |

WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Sunday that a commando raid in Syria this weekend had targeted and resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, claiming a significant victory even as American forces are pulling out of the area.

“Last night, the United States brought the world’s No. 1 terrorist leader to justice,” Mr. Trump said in an unusual nationally televised address from the White House. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead.”

Mr. Trump said Mr. al-Baghdadi was chased to the end of a tunnel, “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way” as he was pursued by American military dogs. Accompanied by three children, Mr. al-Baghdadi then detonated a suicide vest, blowing up himself and the children, Mr. Trump said.

Mr. al-Baghdadi’s body was mutilated by the blast, but Mr. Trump said a test had confirmed his identity. The president made a point of repeatedly portraying Mr. al-Baghdadi as “sick and depraved” and him and his followers as “losers” and “frightened puppies,” using inflammatory, boastful language unlike the more solemn approaches by other presidents in such moments. “He died like a dog,” Mr. Trump said. “He died like a coward.”

Mr. Trump said American forces, ferried by eight helicopters through airspace controlled by Russia with Moscow’s permission, were met by hostile fire when they landed and entered the target building by blowing a hole through the wall rather than take a chance on a booby-trapped main entrance. No Americans were killed in the operation, although Mr. Trump said one of the military dogs was injured.

Mr. Trump, who is under threat of impeachment for abuse of power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate his domestic political rivals, appeared eager to claim credit for the raid, engaging in a lengthy question-and-answer session with reporters after his statement as he personally walked them through the details, promoted his own role and compared himself favorably to past presidents.

The White House released a photograph of Mr. Trump surrounded by top advisers on Saturday in the Situation Room where he monitored the raid on Mr. al-Baghdadi’s hide-out in Syria, much like the famed image of President Barack Obama watching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Mr. Trump even seemed to suggest that killing Mr. al-Baghdadi was a bigger deal than killing Bin Laden.

Mr. al-Baghdadi never occupied the same space in the American psyche as Bin Laden, but proved to be a tenacious and dangerous enemy of the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

The son of a sheepherder from Iraq, Mr. al-Baghdadi, 48, was arrested by occupying American forces in 2004 and emerged radicalized from 11 months of captivity and came to assemble a potent terrorist force that overtook Al Qaeda. He promoted a virulent form of Islam and at one point controlled a swath of territory the size of Britain.

The discovery of Mr. al-Baghdadi’s location came after the arrest and interrogation of one of Mr. al-Baghdadi’s wives and a courier this summer, two American officials said. The location surprised his American pursuers because it was deep inside a part of northwestern Syria controlled by archrival Qaeda groups.

Armed with that initial tip, the C.I.A. worked closely with Kurdish intelligence officials in Iraq and Syria — including those caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from northern Syria earlier this month — to identify Mr. Baghdadi’s whereabouts and to put spies in place to monitor his periodic movements.

For Mr. Trump, a successful operation against Mr. al-Baghdadi could prove both a strategic victory in the battle against the Islamic State and a politically useful counterpoint to critics in both parties who have assailed him in recent weeks for the troop withdrawal, which allowed Turkey to attack and push out America’s Kurdish allies from northern Syria.

But experts have long warned that even eliminating the leader of terrorist organizations like the Islamic State does not eliminate the threat. Mr. al-Baghdadi has been incorrectly reported killed before, and American military officials were concerned that Mr. Trump, who posted a cryptic message on Twitter on Saturday night teasing his Sunday announcement, was so eager to announce the development that he was getting ahead of the forensics.

A Defense Department official said before the president’s announcement that there was a strong belief — “near certainty” — that Mr. al-Baghdadi was dead, but that with any other president, the Pentagon would wait for absolute certainty before announcing victory. But Mr. Trump was impatient to get the news out, the official said, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper appeared on the Sunday morning shows as a last-minute addition to the programs to promote the apparent success.

Critics of the president’s decision to withdraw American forces quickly argued that the operation took place in spite of, not because of, Mr. Trump and that if the military had not slow-rolled his plan to withdraw, the raid would not have been possible. Rather than justifying a pullout, they said, the raid underscored the importance of maintaining an American military presence in Syria and Iraq to keep pressure on the Islamic State.

“We must keep in mind that we were able to strike Baghdadi because we had forces in the region,” said Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida and a former Army Green Beret. “We must keep ISIS from returning by staying on offense.”

Mr. al-Baghdadi has been the focus of an intense international manhunt since 2014 when the terrorist network he led seized huge parts of Iraq and Syria with the intention of creating a caliphate for Islamic extremists. He was believed to hew to extreme security measures, even when meeting with his most-trusted associates.

American forces working with allies on the ground like the Kurdish troops abandoned by Mr. Trump in recent days have swept Islamic State forces from the field in the last couple of years, recapturing the territory it had seized.

Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death is another important victory in the campaign against the Islamic State, but counterterrorism experts warned that the organization could still be a potent threat.

“The danger here is that President Trump decides once again to shift focus away from ISIS now that its leader is dead,” said Jennifer Cafarella, research director for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. “Unfortunately, killing leaders does not defeat terrorist organizations. We should have learned that lesson after killing Osama bin Laden, after which Al Qaeda continued to expand globally.”

The Islamic State has its roots in Al Qaeda in Iraq, a deadly radical Sunni group founded in the early years of the Iraq war by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. In June 2006, Mr. Al-Zarqawi was killed in a safe house by American bombs, but his group continued its devastating violence in Iraq, and the civil war worsened over the next year. Years later, Mr. al-Baghdadi, after a weak period for the group, transformed the organization into the Islamic State, with the help of officials once loyal to Saddam Hussein.

The American commando raid took place on Saturday in Idlib Province, hundreds of miles from the area along the Syrian-Iraqi border where Mr. al-Baghdadi had been believed to be hiding, according to senior officials. Counterterrorism experts expressed surprise that Mr. al-Baghdadi was hiding in an area dominated by Al Qaeda groups so far from his strongholds.

However, the Islamic State has extensively penetrated Idlib Province since the fall of Raqqa, its stronghold in northeastern Syria, in late 2017. The American operation on Saturday took place in a smuggling area near the Turkish border where numerous ISIS foreign fighters have likely traversed, Ms. Cafarella said.

“It could be that he believed the chaos of Idlib would provide him with the cover he needed to blend in among hordes of jihadists and other rebels,” said Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues.

But there is also a more ominous possibility of why Mr. al-Baghdadi was in Idlib. “Baghdadi’s presence in Al Qaeda-dominated areas could signal many things,” Ms. Cafarella said. “Most dangerous among them is resumed negotiations between him and Al Qaeda leaders for reunification and/or a collaboration with Al Qaeda elements on attacks against the West.”

American counterterrorism officials have voiced increased alarm about a Qaeda affiliate in northwestern Syria that they say is plotting attacks against the West by exploiting the chaotic security situation in the country’s northwest and the protection inadvertently afforded by Russian air defenses shielding Syrian government forces allied with Moscow.

This latest Qaeda branch, called Hurras al-Din, emerged in early 2018 after several factions broke away from a larger affiliate in Syria. It is the successor to the Khorasan Group, a small but dangerous organization of hardened senior Qaeda operatives that Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s leader, sent to Syria to plot attacks against the West.

If Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death is confirmed, it would set off a succession struggle among top Islamic State leaders. Many other top leaders have been killed in American drone strikes and raids in the past few years. Anticipating his own death, Mr. al-Baghdadi delegated authorities to regional and functional lieutenants to ensure that the Islamic State operations would continue.

“There are few publicly well-recognized candidates to potentially replace al-Baghdadi,” said Evan F. Kohlmann, who tracks militant websites at the New York security consulting firm Flashpoint Global Partners.

Mr. Kohlmann said the next most prominent public figure from within the Islamic State is its current official spokesman, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, an enigma himself whose exact pedigree is still unclear.

In announcing the raid, Mr. Trump put himself in the center of the action, describing himself as personally hunting Mr. al-Baghdadi since the early days of his administration. He said he watched the action on Saturday with Vice President Mike Pence; Mr. Esper; Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and others in the Situation Room “as though you were watching a movie.”

Unlike previous presidents announcing such operations, Mr. Trump ended his national address by taking questions from reporters. He made a point of thanking Russia, Turkey, Syria and Iraq for their cooperation and said Kurdish forces provided “information that turned out to be helpful.”

By contrast, he described America’s traditional European allies as “a tremendous disappointment,” repeating his complaint that they have not agreed to take captured Islamic State fighters who originated from their countries.

He said that American troops did “an on-site test” of DNA to confirm Mr. al-Baghdadi’s identity and that they brought back “body parts” when leaving the scene. Mr. Trump said two women were found there wearing suicide vests that did not detonate but were killed on the scene.

The raid could help Mr. Trump with at least some hawkish Republican lawmakers who had broken with him over his decision to withdraw troops from Syria even as the president refused to notify Speaker Nancy Pelosi or other Democratic lawmakers in advance as his predecessors did in similar circumstances, saying he did not trust them not to leak.

Mr. Trump invited Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, usually a strong ally who had been the most outspoken critic of his Syria decision, to join him for the speech on Sunday morning and then sent Mr. Graham to brief reporters from the lectern in the White House briefing room, an unusual spectacle for a lawmaker.

Mr. Graham called the raid “a game changer in the war on terror,” while adding that “the war is by no means over.” He said Mr. Trump had reassured him on his concerns. “The president’s determination over time has paid off,” Mr. Graham said. “We don’t give him enough credit for destroying the caliphate.”

He added: “This is a moment when President Trump’s worst critics should say, ‘Well done, Mr. President.’”

Democrats were not quick to take the advice. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading Democratic candidate for president, released a statement praising the military and intelligence officials involved in the raid without mentioning Mr. Trump at all.

Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who is leading the impeachment inquiry, said “good riddance” to “a bloodthirsty killer,” calling the raid “an important victory.” But speaking on “This Week” on ABC, he offered no congratulations to Mr. Trump himself.

Instead, he said it was unwise for Mr. Trump not to notify the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leaders traditionally informed about such operations, noting that doing so would have been helpful for the president if something had gone wrong. He also said the success of the raid did not absolve Mr. Trump of the decision to abandon the Kurds by pulling out.

“It’s a disastrous mistake to betray the Kurds this way,” he said. “I think it just improves the Russian position in the Middle East, something they desperately want.”