The one-time ‘caliph’ was finally tracked down to a remote village in Syria’s northwest province of Idlib, close to the Turkish border, where US forces launched their daring raid in the early hours of Sunday morning.
The ISIS chief hid “whimpering and crying” in a dead-end tunnel with three of his children before detonating a suicide vest, according to US President Donald Trump.
“I want to thank the nations of Russia, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and I also want to thank the Syrian Kurds for certain support they were able to give us,” Trump told a White House press conference on Sunday morning, confirming Baghdadi death.
Although Trump did not specifically name the Iraqi Kurds, the administration and Kurdish officials have both confirmed Iraqi Kurds played an important role in the overnight raid alongside the Syrian Kurds.
“We have worked closely with the Americans for more than five years against Daesh (ISIS) and provided valuable intelligence to them,” one senior Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) intelligence official told Rudaw, on condition of anonymity.
“The Kurdistan Region Security Council played a critical role in this operation, but I am not at liberty to say how,” the official added, referring to the KRG’s intelligence agency.
The official detailed the agency’s role in providing critical intelligence and assistance to the US, but later asked for the information to be withheld.
Baghdadi sat at the helm of one of the most brutal terrorist organizations of modern times. At its height, the group controlled an area straddling Iraq and Syria roughly the size of the United Kingdom, imposing a regime rooted in fear over several million people.
The shadowy ISIS chief was known to have made just one significant public appearance – his declaration of the so-called caliphate in 2014 at a mosque in Mosul, northern Iraq.
One month after the group’s last holdout of Baghouz, Deir ez-Zor province was taken by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Baghdadi issued a video message calling on his followers to be patient in the face of defeat because “the war of Islam … against the crusaders … is a long one”.
The battle for Baghouz demonstrated the “barbarism and brutality” of the West and the “courage, steadfastness and resilience of the nation of Islam”, he said.
The operation to track down Baghdadi started in the summer of 2019, according to the New York Times, when the CIA received “surprising” information about the ISIS chief’s general location in northwest Syria in an area controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – an umbrella group including the Nusra Front and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Hurras al-Din – rivals of ISIS.
The information reportedly came from one of Baghdadi’s wives and a courier detained by Iraqi forces.
“The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country,” the paper said.
A tip from a disaffected ISIS member, who had become a Kurdish informant, set the operation in motion, one administration official told the Washington Post. The informant provided vital information over the summer about Baghdadi’s whereabouts, which turned out to be solid.
“Something very big has just happened!” Trump tweeted in the early hours of Sunday morning. This was soon followed by a tweet from SDF commander Mazloum Kobani Abdi, claiming SDF intelligence officials had worked with the American over a period of five months to hunt down Baghdadi.
“For five months there has been joint intel cooperation on the ground and accurate monitoring, until we achieved a joint operation to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Thanks to everybody who participated in this great mission,” Abdi tweeted.
According to anonymous sources who spoke to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), three of the eight helicopters that took part in the operation carried SDF counter-terrorism forces and played an important role in the operation.
SDF spokesperson Redur Xelil told a press conference on Sunday evening that the participation of the Kurds in the operation and the killing of Baghdadi was “revenge for the Kurdish Yezidi women” and a host of other crimes that ISIS committed during its reign of terror since 2014.
Amy Klobuchar, a US senator from Minnesota, told CBS Face the Nation: “This was the takedown of a very, very dangerous terrorist… The decision was a good one… this doesn’t mean that ISIS isn’t still there.”
“We still have, of course, over 100 of the ISIS fighters that the defense secretary has said got out recently of their confinement and then we have others that are in a prison and it’s unclear who’s going to be guarding that prison,” she said.
“So there are problems not just in Syria, but all over the world and that’s what concerns me overall about this president’s decision-making and about what he has done in terms of breaking down our alliances, leaving the Kurds who gave us intelligence for this operation, leaving them for slaughter.”
Klobuchar was referring to Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from northeast Syria, effectively greenlighting Turkey’s attack on Syria’s Kurdish forces on October 9. The move has been widely branded a betrayal of America’s Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS.
In a separate statement, SDF commander Abdi said another joint operation with US forces had resulted in the death of ISIS spokesperson Abu Hesen al-Mouhjir overnight on Sunday.
