President Trump's abrupt decision to pull forces from northern Syria forced the Pentagon to press ahead with a risky night operation that killed the ISIS leader, military officials said.
WASHINGTON — President Trump knew the Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations commandos were zeroing in on the location for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, when he ordered American troops to withdraw from northern Syria earlier this month, intelligence, military and counterterrorism officials said on Sunday.
For months, intelligence officials had kept Mr. Trump apprised of what he had set as a top priority, the hunt for Mr. al-Baghdadi, the world's most wanted terrorist.
But Mr. Trump's abrupt withdrawal order three weeks ago disrupted the meticulous planning underway and forced Pentagon officials to speed up the plan for the risky night raid before their ability to control troops, spies and reconnaissance aircraft disappeared with the pullout, the officials said.
Mr. al-Baghdadi's death in the raid on Saturday, they said, occurred largely in spite of, and not because of, Mr. Trump's actions.
It is unclear how much Mr. Trump considered the intelligence on Mr. al-Baghdadi's location when he made the surprise decision to withdraw the American troops during a telephone call on Oct. 6 with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. What is clear, military officials said, is that it put commanders on the ground under even more pressure to carry out the complicated operation.
More than a half-dozen Pentagon, military, intelligence and counterterrorism officials — along with Mr. Trump, who gave an account during a White House news conference on Sunday — provided a chronology of the raid.
The planning for the raid began this past summer, when the C.I.A. first got surprising information about Mr. al-Baghdadi's general location in a village deep inside a part of northwestern Syria controlled by rival Qaeda groups. The information came after the arrest and interrogation of one of Mr. al-Baghdadi's wives and a courier, 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 more precisely Mr. al-Baghdadi's whereabouts and to put spies in place to monitor his periodic movements. American officials said the Kurds continued to provide information to the C.I.A. on Mr. al-Baghdadi's location 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.
According to a Syrian engineer who spoke with villagers living near the raid site, Mr. al-Baghdadi had sought shelter in the home of Abu Mohammed Salama, a commander of another extremist group, Hurras al-Din. The commander's fate in that raid, and the precise nature of his relationship to Mr. al-Baghdadi, are not clear.
As the Army's elite Delta Force commando unit began drawing up and rehearsing plans to conduct the mission to kill or capture the ISIS leader, they knew they faced formidable 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 least twice at the last minute.The final planning for the raid came together over two to three days last week. A senior administration official said that Mr. al-Baghdadi was "about to move." Military officials determined that they had to go swiftly. If Mr. al-Baghdadi moved again, it would be much harder to track him with the American military pulling out its troops and surveillance assets on the ground in Syria.
By Thursday and then Friday, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on ABC's "This Week," Mr. Trump "gave us the green light to proceed.''
Around midnight Sunday morning in the region — 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.Mr. Trump said that with the helicopter gunships firing from above, the commandos had 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 video of the raid 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. As the Delta Force team breached the wall with explosives, an Arabic linguist advised children and other noncombatants how to flee, a decision commanders credited with saving 11 of the children Mr. al-Baghdadi had in his compound.
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 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, 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."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."
At 7:15 p.m. Washington time on Saturday, the Special Operations commander on the ground reported that Mr. al-Baghdadi had been killed. Five other "enemy combatants" were killed in the compound, the White House said, and "additional enemies were killed in the vicinity."
Two American service members were slightly wounded, the White House said, but have returned to duty. The American military dog was wounded in Mr. al-Baghdadi's suicide-vest explosion and was taken away, Mr. Trump said.
After the raid, the commandos removed the 11 children from the site and handed them over to a woman in the area. The military then ordered the destruction of the site, to ensure it would not in the future become a shrine to ISIS, according to a person familiar with the operation.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 had 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 had taken off — Mr. Trump tweeted, "Something very big has just happened!"
Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Julian E. Barnes, New York Times, October 27, 2019
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October 28, 2019
Voices4America Post Script. Sad, but read all about it! "Mr. al-Baghdadi's death in the raid on Saturday, they said, occurred largely in spite of, and not because of, Mr. Trump's actions."
Trump then held a bizarre press conference on Sunday in which he turned a victory for our amazing and brave troops into a claim of glory and talk about himself.
As Matt Stieb summarized the press conference (New York magazine, October 27, 2019):
“Any time President Trump speaks for 48 minutes straight, you can expect some pretty unhinged remarks; on Sunday, things started to get weird just 90 seconds in, when Trump described the ISIS leader as"whimpering and crying and screaming all the way" to the back of a tunnel in his compound, where he detonated a suicide vest as he was surrounded by three of his children. The president, who did little to hide his enjoyment in the moment, said that "it was just like a movie."
Here are some highlights and analyses of Trump's talk.
1. Did Trump identify Osama bin Laden before 9/11?
At the 50 minutes Press Conference which soon devolved into Trump deranged boasts about his own brilliance, he claimed Baghdadi "the biggest one we've ever captured."
He also said that the ISIS leader had been a global threat "long before I took office"—a not-so-subtle dig at the Obama administration, which had killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden."
He downplayed the importance of the killing of Osama Bin Laden during President Obama's watch: “Hamza bin Laden was a big thing, but this is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was very big but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole — as he would like to call it — a country, a caliphate. And was trying to do it again."
Trump also took a moment to take credit for having identified bin Laden as a terrorist threat before 9/11.
Here are the facts about Trump's claim to have identified Osama bin Laden before our Intelligence services did.
At October 27 Press Conference, Trump said : “You know, if you read my book, there was a book just before the World Trade Center came down. And I don't get any credit for this but that's OK. I never do. But here we are. I wrote a book, a really very successful book and in that book about a year before the World Trade Center was blown up, I said there is somebody named Osama bin Laden, you better kill him or take him out, something to that effect, he's big trouble. Now, I wasn't in government. I was building buildings and doing what I did but I always found it fascinating. But I saw this man, tall, handsome, very charismatic making horrible statements about wanting to destroy our country. And I'm writing a book. I think I wrote 12 books. All did very well. And I'm writing a book, World Trade Center had not come down. I think it was about, if you check it was a year before the World Trade Center came down. And nobody heard of al-Baghdadi. And no one heard of Osama bin Laden until really the World Trade Center.
But about a year, a year and a half before the World Trade Center, before the book came out, I was talking about Osama bin Laden, you have to kill him, you have to take him out. Nobody listened to me. And to this day I get people coming up to me and they said you know what, one of the most amazing things I've seen about you is that you predicted that Osama bin Laden had to be killed before he knocked down the World Trade Center. It's true. Most of the press doesn't want to write that but it is true. If you go back and look at my book, I think it's 'The America We Deserve.' I made a prediction — let's put it this way, if they would have listened to me, a lot of things would have been different." (Trump inappropriate and boastful remarks underlined. Trump major false claim in bold).
Reality. there is only one—yes, just one—brief reference to Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda in the book Trump and a co-writer published in 2000 called The America We Deserve.
Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We're not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We're playing tournament chess—one master against many rivals. One day we're all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything's fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. One day we're told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it's on to a new enemy and new crisis."
Gratitude for the research to Kara Vogt, Mother Jones, October 27, 2019.
2. Trump's divulged sensitive information about the Baghdadi raid. First, what was true? Then, what might have consequences for our military? Yes, if the president says it, it is no longer classified information.
a. Trump asserted, al-Baghdadi "died like a dog, he died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming, and crying. “ Is that true?
Secretary of Defense Espy said, I don't have those details." Espy speculated to cover for what was most likely another Trump lie," The president probably had the opportunity to talk to the commanders on the ground."
The New York Times reported this today, “Those surveillance feeds could not show what was happening in an underground tunnel, much less detect if Mr. al-Baghdadi was whimpering or crying." The Times also reported, “Mr. Trump would not have received any real-time dialogue from the scene, the officials said, because the last thing American military planners want is to invite critique, second-guessing or even new orders from the Situation Room in the middle of an active military raid."
As to the tone Trump took to describe al-Baghdadi's death, “Highlighting and repeating that language is not especially dignified for the United States. We should always take a higher moral ground, and talking about an individual's death is not particularly productive," Mchael Leiter, who led the US National Counterterrorism Center from 2007 to 2011, (Alex Ward, Vox, October 27, 2019).
"What the president should've spent more time on was highlighting ISIS's atrocities, like the killing of the Jordanian pilot. That's appropriate: It shows that ISIS wasn't at war with the West, it was at war with all peoples who are civilized, including Muslims who don't adhere to their extremely strict view of Sunni Islam."
b. During his question-and-answer session, Trump divulged multiple sensitive details about the raid in Syria that could possibly give US enemies intelligence advantages.
"Talking about how many aircraft, where the aircraft are flying in, how they're breaching a building, other technology they can bring to bear, knowledge about the tunnels and the mapping of those tunnels, these are operational details which are only about preening, “ Leiter told Ward, Vox, October 27, 2019.
This is also from Alex Ward:
“Trump spent a lot of time after his prepared remarks offering more information than his administration would've surely preferred. Here are just a few examples:
- "Two or three efforts" to get Baghdadi were scrapped over a few weeks because of the terrorist leader's unpredictable movements.
- Before the raid, the US knew that Baghdad's compound had tunnels through which he might try to escape.
- US troops blew a hole through a door in order to go inside the compound.
- The US had more DNA than it needed to verify that the one of the men killed in the raid was Baghdadi.
- The US killed scores of people in Baghdadi's circle and captured others.
- The US used eight helicopters and other ships and planes to help with the strike.
No matter how many ways you cut it, that's a lot of information. The US usually offers some detail to help the public understand how such a daring operation went down, but not so much that it gives Americans — and potential adversaries — so much inside information about equipment, intelligence, planning, or tactics.
“I think the president disclosed more than what was necessary, and it could provide an advantage to our adversary," Leiter told Ward.
“Part of the reason is that the ISIS members will have more data on how the US conducts raids of this nature, learn that American intelligence has nitty-gritty intelligence on the layout of terrorist compounds, and assume that US intelligence officials may learn new information from captured people and documents. Any warning to ISIS members that the US has this newfound font of knowledge could lead them to change their ways, which makes the intelligence less useful over time."
In other words, it will now be somewhat harder for the US to fight off ISIS thanks to Trump's ill-advised comments.
3. Trump told Russia bout the raid but didn't tell Congress, notably the #3 person in line for the Presidency, What the...!
Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted her displeasure after Trump's comments. "The House must be briefed on this raid, which the Russians but not top Congressional Leadership were notified of in advance, and on the administration's overall strategy in the region," she said. "Our military and allies deserve strong, smart and strategic leadership from Washington."
As Speaker Nancy Pelosi said to Trump last week: Why do "all roads lead to Vladimir Putin"?
Have a look at Trump's thank you comments: “This raid was impeccable, and could only have taken place with the acknowledgment and help of certain other nations and people. 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."
Russia heads Trump's list, though our military has said the help of the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds made the raid possible, “The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country.” (New York Times, October 27, 2019)
4. As to the authenticity of the Situation Room photo Trump posted, there are questions.
As reported, the raid took place at 3:30PM Washington time on Saturday. The photo, as shown in the camera IPTC data, was taken at "17:05:24". The time stamp is 95 minutes after raid, and the cords are not plugged into laptops.
At time of the raid, Trump was at golf course.
To conclude, as Alex Ward said, Trump could've just given his Baghdadi remarks and walked away. He didn't — and made a mess.
And further, just in case you are wondering about the likely long turn effect of al-Baghdadi's death, this article describes the current military and diplomatic consensus:
Leader's Death Will Damage ISIS, but Not Destroy It
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/world/middleeas...
#NotFitToBePOTUS
#ImpeachRemove
