Press Conference Announcing the Death of al-Baghdadi Was Peak Trump
By Matt Stieb
Photo: 0001561/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The president, who appears to relish violent rhetoric, personal boasting, the defeat of his enemies, and the simplicity of a good vs. evil narrative, announced on Sunday morning that U.S. Special Forces had killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a raid in northwestern Syria on Saturday. With such a natural lining up of his interests, Trump turned the event into a spectacle, even promoting the press conference on Twitter the night before.
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.”
Trump’s aim seemed to be to dehumanize al-Baghdadi, the terrorist responsible for the Yazidi genocide, systematic sex slavery within ISIS-controlled territory, and the deaths of thousands in the region. “He was a gutless animal,” Trump said, later adding that “he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying.” He employed one of his frequent, incoherent, jabs at al-Baghdadi, claiming that he “died like a dog.” In a bizarre piece of symmetry, as Trump degraded the terrorist, he elevated a military canine involved in the raid: “Our K-9, as they call it — I call it a dog, a beautiful dog, a talented dog — was injured and brought back, but we had no soldier injured … We had nobody even hurt. That’s why the dog was so great.”
Trump also used the occasion of his administration’s greatest national-security victory to date to celebrate himself. After explaining the Islamic State’s achievement in recruiting disaffected young men online, he complimented the terrorist organization: “You know, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump.” The next few sentences were a blur: “And what they’ve done with the internet through recruiting and everything — and that’s why he died like a dog, he died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming and crying. And frankly that’s something that should be brought out.”
He also found a way to weave in some historical revisionism, claiming that “if you read about the history of Donald Trump, I was a civilian. I had absolutely nothing to do with going into Iraq and I was totally against it.” That’s a standard Trump lie, though the next one was new to the canon: “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’s somebody named Osama bin Laden, you better kill him or take him out, something to that effect, he’s big trouble … And I’m saying to people, take out Osama bin Laden, that nobody ever heard of.” Trump mentioned bin Laden in his 2000 book, but did not call for his death or warn that he would conduct a major terror attack against the U.S. — and of course, bin Laden was a well-known figure at the time.
Trump was certainly aware of the moment eight years ago when President Obama more professionally announced the death of bin Laden — and maturely claimed that his terrorist death outdid that of his predecessor. “This is the worst ever,” he said. “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.”
Dehumanizing enemies, claiming to upstage Obama, celebrating details of war like they existed only on television — Trump was hitting all the high notes, and his campaign soon added to the performance. Hours later, Trump was using the death of al-Baghdadi as a fundraising pitch, making it doubtful that he will take the advice he gave during the 2012 election, when he suggested people stop congratulating Obama on the death of bin Laden.
By Matt Stieb
Photo: 0001561/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The president, who appears to relish violent rhetoric, personal boasting, the defeat of his enemies, and the simplicity of a good vs. evil narrative, announced on Sunday morning that U.S. Special Forces had killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a raid in northwestern Syria on Saturday. With such a natural lining up of his interests, Trump turned the event into a spectacle, even promoting the press conference on Twitter the night before.
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.”
Trump’s aim seemed to be to dehumanize al-Baghdadi, the terrorist responsible for the Yazidi genocide, systematic sex slavery within ISIS-controlled territory, and the deaths of thousands in the region. “He was a gutless animal,” Trump said, later adding that “he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying.” He employed one of his frequent, incoherent, jabs at al-Baghdadi, claiming that he “died like a dog.” In a bizarre piece of symmetry, as Trump degraded the terrorist, he elevated a military canine involved in the raid: “Our K-9, as they call it — I call it a dog, a beautiful dog, a talented dog — was injured and brought back, but we had no soldier injured … We had nobody even hurt. That’s why the dog was so great.”
Trump also used the occasion of his administration’s greatest national-security victory to date to celebrate himself. After explaining the Islamic State’s achievement in recruiting disaffected young men online, he complimented the terrorist organization: “You know, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump.” The next few sentences were a blur: “And what they’ve done with the internet through recruiting and everything — and that’s why he died like a dog, he died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming and crying. And frankly that’s something that should be brought out.”
He also found a way to weave in some historical revisionism, claiming that “if you read about the history of Donald Trump, I was a civilian. I had absolutely nothing to do with going into Iraq and I was totally against it.” That’s a standard Trump lie, though the next one was new to the canon: “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’s somebody named Osama bin Laden, you better kill him or take him out, something to that effect, he’s big trouble … And I’m saying to people, take out Osama bin Laden, that nobody ever heard of.” Trump mentioned bin Laden in his 2000 book, but did not call for his death or warn that he would conduct a major terror attack against the U.S. — and of course, bin Laden was a well-known figure at the time.
Trump was certainly aware of the moment eight years ago when President Obama more professionally announced the death of bin Laden — and maturely claimed that his terrorist death outdid that of his predecessor. “This is the worst ever,” he said. “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.”
Dehumanizing enemies, claiming to upstage Obama, celebrating details of war like they existed only on television — Trump was hitting all the high notes, and his campaign soon added to the performance. Hours later, Trump was using the death of al-Baghdadi as a fundraising pitch, making it doubtful that he will take the advice he gave during the 2012 election, when he suggested people stop congratulating Obama on the death of bin Laden.
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Trump's Syria Troop Withdrawal Complicated Plans for al-Baghdadi Raid
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President Trump confirms ISIS leader is dead after U.S.-led raid in Syria
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WASHINGTON — President Donald 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 U.S. troops to withdraw from northern Syria earlier this month, intelligence, military and counterterrorism officials said Sunday.
For months, intelligence officials had kept Trump apprised of what he had set as a top priority, the hunt for al-Baghdadi, the world’s most wanted terrorist.
But 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, officials said.
Al-Baghdadi’s death in the raid Saturday, they said, occurred largely despite, and not because of, Trump’s actions.
It is unclear how much Trump considered the intelligence on al-Baghdadi’s location when he made the surprise decision to withdraw U.S. troops during a telephone call 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 Trump, who gave an account during a White House news conference Sunday — provided a chronology of the raid.
The planning for the raid began this past summer, when the CIA first got surprising information about al-Baghdadi’s general location in a village deep inside a part of northwestern Syria controlled by rival al-Qaida groups. The information came after the arrest and interrogation of one of al-Baghdadi’s wives and a courier, two U.S. officials said.
Armed with that initial tip, the CIA worked closely with Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officials in Iraq and Syria to identify more precisely al-Baghdadi’s whereabouts and to put spies in place to monitor his periodic movements. U.S. officials said the Kurds continued to provide information to the CIA on al-Baghdadi’s location even after Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. 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, 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 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-Qaida. 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 al-Baghdadi was “about to move.” Military officials determined that they had to go swiftly. If al-Baghdadi moved again, it would be much harder to track him with the U.S. military pulling out its troops and surveillance assets on the ground in Syria.
By Thursday and then Friday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on ABC’s “This Week,” Trump “gave us the green light to proceed.”
Around midnight Sunday morning in the region — 5 p.m. Saturday in Washington — eight U.S. helicopters, primarily CH-47 Chinooks, took off from a military base near Irbil, 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.
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 Esper, Vice President Mike Pence and Gen. Mark Milley, 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 al-Baghdadi had in his compound.
Al-Baghdadi ran into an underground tunnel, with U.S. commandos in pursuit. Trump said that the ISIS leader took three children with him, presumably to use as human shields from U.S. fire. Fearing that al-Baghdadi was wearing a suicide vest, commandos dispatched a military dog to subdue al-Baghdadi, Trump said.
It was then that the Islamic State leader set off the explosives, killing the three children, Trump said.
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.”
Trump was more descriptive. “I got to watch much of it,” he said. Al-Baghdadi, he said, “died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.”
Esper did not repeat the “whimpering” and “crying” assertion made by 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 Saturday, the Special Operations commander on the ground reported that al-Baghdadi had been killed. Five other “enemy combatants” were killed in the compound, White House officials said, and “additional enemies were killed in the vicinity.”
Two U.S. service members were slightly wounded, White House officials said, but have returned to duty. The U.S. military dog was wounded in al-Baghdadi’s suicide-vest explosion and was taken away, Trump said.
After the raid, 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, U.S. troops were on the ground in the compound for around two hours, Trump said, clearing the buildings of fighters and scooping up information that the president said contained important details on ISIS operations. Trump said 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, Trump said — U.S. warplanes bombed the compound to ensure it was physically destroyed, Esper said. Just after 9 p.m. Washington time Saturday — four hours after the helicopters had taken off — Trump tweeted, “Something very big has just happened!”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.