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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2019 5:33:11 GMT
The world’s most wanted terrorist, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was the target of a deadly U.S.-led raid in northwestern Syria, sources told NBC News early Sunday. Forensic testing is underway, but officials believe al-Baghdadi is among the dead, the sources said. A U.S. Special Ops mission targeted the ISIS leader near Barisha, Syria, overnight in a mission that included helicopters, jets and U.S. drones. The U.S. fired from the air and then landed and gathered intelligence, the sources said. Several others were also killed in a convoy. The White House has said the president will make a statement at 9 a.m. Sunday. It did not provide additional details. Saturday night Trump appeared to foreshadow the news on Twitter. “Something very big has just happened!” he posted. Until April, al-Baghdadi had not been seen for five years. That month ISIS, released an 18-minute video in which a bearded man resembling al-Baghdadi appeared sitting cross-legged on the ground with an assault-style weapon propped up against a wall and praised terrorists who carried out Easter bombings of churches in Sri Lanka. For years, reports have circulated questioning whether al-Baghdadi is alive. Some reports have claimed that he was killed in a U.S. ordered-drone strikes, while others said he was hiding out in remote regions of Syria or Iraq.
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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2019 19:05:17 GMT
Donald Trump has announced that the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed in a raid by US special forces on his Syrian safehouse, ending a years-long manhunt for one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.
Trump said the two-hour operation was conducted on Saturday night in the province of Idlib, one of the last areas of the country still outside Syrian regime control, and that US officials had confirmed Baghdadi, 48, was among those killed.
The president said the Isis leader died “running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way”.
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2019 3:57:58 GMT
President Donald Trump’s announcement of the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi revealed a slew of sensitive details about the secret military operation that could imperil future raids, special operations and intelligence, veterans fear. Trump, who spoke for a full 48 minutes and took a series of questions at the White House, went into unusual detail about the mission inside hostile territory in Syria that he said he watched in real time “as though you were watching a movie." Among the most striking were his descriptions of how the Army Delta Force was inserted into the heavily fortified compound, breached its walls to avoid booby-trapped doors and pursued the terrorist kingpin into a network of tunnels, where he detonated his suicide vest, killing himself and three children. But considered especially egregious were Trump's remarks about the number and route of the commando's helicopters. “I always get a little bit nervous when people without knowledge of operations start describing operations,” said Michael Nagata, a retired Army lieutenant general who was the senior special operations commander in the Middle East during the early stages of the anti-ISIS campaign. “It’s a good story, and I can understand the impulse to tell a good story. Telling it can have positive benefits. But the benefits are unpredictable and marginal, whereas the harm could be more substantial." Taken together, some of the details Trump revealed could help terrorist groups piece together new information about how U.S. counterterrorism forces gather intelligence and execute such dangerous missions, said veterans of previous operations.
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2019 6:58:34 GMT
The intelligence Trump didn’t offer specifics about how the U.S. located Baghdadi. But he keyed in on the highly sensitive discipline of signals intelligence — or the remote monitoring of enemy communications — that struck several with deep experience as better left alone.
“These people are very smart, they’re not into cell phones anymore," Trump said. "They're not — they're very technically brilliant. You know, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump. But they use the internet incredibly well."
"Why mention it?” asked Nagata. "It could contribute to a reverse engineering of our intelligence methods by the adversary, and if there’s any possibility of that, why do it?”
Trump also described the layout of the compound. "The tunnels were dead end for the most part," he recounted. "There was one we think that wasn’t but we had that covered too,” he said, seemingly suggesting the U.S. mapped the tunnel network ahead of time.
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2019 0:34:54 GMT
At the White House Sunday morning, President Trump profusely thanked Russia for its alleged involvement in the killing of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Trump said: "[The Russians] were very cooperative, they really were good... Russia treated us great. They opened up, we had to fly over certain Russia areas, Russia-held areas. Russia was great."
The Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov, refuted President Trump’s statement, stating in part: “The Russian Defense Ministry has no reliable information about U.S. servicemen conducting an operation for ‘yet another’ elimination of the former Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the Turkish-controlled part of the Idlib de-escalation zone.”
The Russian Defense Ministry also disputed President Trump’s claim that Russia provided access to U.S. air units entering the airspace over the Idlib de-escalation zone during that mission in Syria. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to provide a comment about President Trump’s announcement, directing everyone to General Konashenkov’s statement.
Kremlin-controlled Russian state media shot down President Trump’s announcement, with headlines that read: “The Russian Defense Ministry does not believe in al-Baghdadi’s liquidation.” Major General Igor Konashenkov scoffed at the changing details of the operation, with Trump adding alleged participants and various countries that supposedly took part in the raid, “each with completely contradictory details,” which Konashenkov said “raises reasonable questions and doubts about [the operation’s] veracity, not to mention success.”
Konashenkov said that the entire territory of the Idlib de-escalation zone that is not under control of the Assad government is in the grip of the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda—the terrorist group Jebhat al-Nusra—which he argued “always uncompromisingly exterminated any ISIS representatives on the spot as the main rivals for power in Syria.” Therefore, Konashenkov does not believe President Trump’s claims that the former ISIS leader could be quietly hiding in the territory controlled by Syrian Al-Qaeda, demanding “at least some direct evidence from the United States or other participants in the operation."
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