Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reclusive leader of the world’s deadliest terrorist movement, was killed during a daring nighttime raid by U.S. Special Operations soldiers in northwestern Syria, President Trump announced, in an address to the nation on Sunday morning. After five years of spawning terror that reached the far corners of the globe, the leader of ISIS was trapped—“whimpering and crying and screaming”—in a dead-end tunnel, with three children, Trump said. “The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear.”
As U.S. troops closed in, Baghdadi—a forty-eight-year-old Iraqi who proclaimed himself “emir” of the Islamic State caliphate, in 2014—detonated his suicide vest. The tunnel collapsed; Baghdadi and his three children were killed. “He died like a dog,” Trump said. “He died like a coward. The world is now a much safer place.” A military tech team, which had samples of Baghdadi’s DNA, sifted through the debris and matched parts of Baghdadi’s body within minutes. “It was him,” the President said. Several other ISIS fighters and two of Baghdadi’s wives died during the raid; other ISIS members were captured. No American troops were killed, Trump said. The only U.S. injury was to a trained Special Forces canine. The U.S. teams managed to seize sensitive material, including plans for future ISIS operations.
The two-hour raid was so efficient that U.S. forces, ferried in on eight helicopters, did not need to use a robot that they had brought with them to lead the way, in the event that explosives were used. They “accomplished their mission in grand style,” Trump declared. “This raid was impeccable.” The President watched the mission unfold as it began, shortly after 5 P.M. Eastern time, from the White House Situation Room, after an afternoon of golf. Trump said the technology was so sophisticated that it was like watching a movie.
Experts called the Baghdadi raid a major advance in the decades-long campaign against jihadi extremism globally. “It’s a significant blow to ISIS and a tribute to our Special Forces, who have been on his trail, with some close calls, over the last five years,” Brett McGurk, the former U.S. Presidential envoy to the campaign against ISIS, told me. “Baghdadi is significant because he declared himself the caliph and the head of a caliphate that was a rallying cry for tens of thousands of extremists around the world. That will be hard to replace.” At the same time, however, “it does not end the threat of ISIS, of course.”
Since 2014, Baghdadi had been the world’s most wanted terrorist; he long had a U.S. bounty—of twenty-five million dollars—on his head. In 2017, Russia erroneously claimed to have killed him, in an air strike on Raqqa, ISIS’s capital. His real name was Ibrahim Awad al-Samarrai. He was born in Tobchi, Iraq, near Samarra, to a devout family that followed the ultraconservative Salafi school of Sunni Islam. He joined the resistance against U.S. troops after the invasion, in 2003. He was arrested by American forces in 2004 and held in Camp Bucca, a prison that became infamous as a breeding ground for extremism. At the time, Baghdadi was deemed a minor player and released after a few months. He later went on to assume the leadership of Al Qaeda in Iraq, after U.S.-led air strikes killed its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006. The Islamic State in Iraq was forced underground. It had only a few hundred followers.
Baghdadi gained global notoriety after his ragtag militia of jihadis exploited the chaos in Syria, in 2013, to build a base of operations and expand into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—or ISIS. It began luring tens of thousands of fighters, from five continents. In 2014, Baghdadi’s men blitzed across the border into Iraq, sucking up land, besieging major cities, slaughtering local men who refused to join ISIS, enslaving women, and forcing the far larger and better-equipped Iraqi Army to flee. By July, ISIS held a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq—redrawing the map of the Middle East and creating a caliphate roughly the size of Britain. It stretched from the Turkish border all the way to the outskirts of Baghdad and reached within twenty-five kilometres of the border with Iran. Baghdadi ruled over some eight million people. His caliphate thrived financially by selling oil from northeastern Syria, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from banks, extorting businesses, and levying taxes.
In his first public appearance, Baghdadi declared ISIS’s caliphate at the millennium-old Great Mosque of al-Nuri, in the northern-Iraqi city of Mosul. “Support the religion of Allah through jihad,” he demanded, dressed in a black turban, denoting descent from the Prophet Muhammad. “Terrify the enemies of Allah and seek death in the places where you expect to find it, for the dunya [worldly life] will come to an end, and the hereafter will last forever. . . . This worldly life is only amusement and diversion.”
Unlike Osama bin Laden, the late leader of Al Qaeda, who was killed in another U.S. Special Forces raid, in 2011, Baghdadi rarely released audio or video messages. He never gave interviews. He was last heard from in April, a month after a U.S.-backed campaign seized the last chunk of ISIS-controlled territory, in Baghouz, in the oil-rich scrublands of Syria, bordering Iraq. In an eighteen-minute video, Baghdadi tried rally his followers and counter the idea that ISIS had been defeated. “The war of Islam and its followers against the crusaders and their followers is a long one,” Baghdadi said, sitting on the floor of a bare, whitewashed room, among a small group of followers.
In a striking comment, Trump thanked several other parties for unspecified coöoperation in the U.S. raid. He cited the Kurds in the Syrian Democratic Forces, Russia, Iraq, Turkey, and even Syria’s Assad regime. After Trump’s announcement, the S.D.F. commander, General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, tweeted, “For five months there has been joint intel cooperation on the ground and accurate monitoring, until we achieved a joint operation to kill Abu Bakir al-Bagdadi.” Despite Trump’s decision to withdraw most American forces from Syria, Mazloum tweeted that the joint U.S.-and-S.D.F. campaign against ISIS is “going strong and soon there will be other effective operations.” (The Syrian Democratic Forces, which lost eleven thousand troops fighting the ground war against ISIS, now holds about twelve thousand ISIS prisoners and another seventy thousand family members.)
Baghdadi was the most elusive of the ISIS leaders. U.S. air strikes picked off several of his top lieutenants, including the propaganda chief Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, known as the “Voice of ISIS,” in 2016. At one point, there was a joke among U.S. counterterrorism officials about the most dangerous job in the world being Baghdadi’s No. 2, as they were picked off one after another.
One of the most startling aspects of the raid was Baghdadi’s location, in Idlib—a long way from the area that he once ruled and where his followers are still waging an insurgency. McGurk, the former Presidential envoy, asked, “A big question is what was Baghdadi doing apparently in a hideout less than five kilometres from Turkey’s border? In a province Turkey ostensibly controls and maintains with military outposts.”
ISIS has survived earlier leadership losses, including a U.S. air strike that killed al-Zarqawi, in 2010. Zarqawi was an early architect of the movement and helped it survive the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq, in 2006, and also the tribal awakening, in 2007. ISIS may try to do it again. “ISIS has a blueprint, which it has already been following, that mirrored what they did the last decade during similar setbacks,” Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadi movements at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. “ISIS, no doubt, was grooming potential replacements and what could happen next. I would be surprised if much changed on a day-to-day basis in the near-to-medium term.”
Today, ISIS is strongest in the Deir Ezzor region in Syria and the Diyala region in Iraq, Zelin said. U.S. intelligence has estimated that ISIS has between twenty thousand and thirty thousand fighters in underground cells still operating in both countries. In these areas, ISIS has far fewer capabilities, weapons, financial resources, and propaganda outlets than it had up until 2016. “But it is building back strength after the loss of its territory,” Zelin said.
ISIS—like Al Qaeda, its jihadi counterpart—is also a decentralized movement, with arms beyond Syria and Iraq. The Sunni-extremist movement still has “provinces”—or wilayas, in Arabic—in Afghanistan and a dozen other countries, according to the Counter Extremism Project. One of its most active branches is in Afghanistan, where the United States, NATO, and the Taliban all fear the rise of ISIS’s Khorasan wing. In August, an ISIS suicide bomber struck a wedding party in Kabul, killing sixty-three and wounding almost two hundred more. ISIS followers or supporters have carried out attacks even in countries where it does not have formal wings, including Lebanon, France, and Belgium. On Easter, after the caliphate’s collapse, it carried out suicide bombings at three churches in Sri Lanka, killing more than two hundred and fifty Christians. Its followers in the United States have carried out attacks in San Bernardino, Orlando, and on the Ohio State campus.
“Ideally, we would use this significant event to consolidate positions and uproot ISIS networks with intelligence gained from the site,” McGurk said. He acknowledged, however, that “that will be harder to do after the events of the last month in northeast Syria,” from where President Trump abruptly ordered the pullout of American Special Forces soldiers. Other experts think the ISIS leader’s elimination will have a more enduring impact than any earlier transitions. “Baghdadi is dead, and ISIS is hit hard,” Daniel Byman, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the new book “Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad,” told me. “The group will endure, but this is another major blow to an organization whose core is under siege.”
Baghdadi’s death is potentially a boost for Trump as he faces the growing threat of impeachment. In his address, he framed the capture or killing of Baghdadi as his top national-security priority. The President’s promise that he will withdraw U.S. forces from the “endless wars” in the Middle East has been popular on the campaign trail, and a theme to counter political trouble at home.
Trump vowed that the Baghdadi raid would not be the last. The United States is already tracking his successors, the President said. “Baghdadi’s demise demonstrates America’s relentless pursuit of terrorist leaders, and our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS. The reach of America is long,” he warned, pointing out the recent U.S. raid that killed Hamza bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son and heir. “Terrorists who oppress and murder innocent people should never sleep soundly, knowing that we will completely destroy them.”
