1111
and, during almost a year in custody,
turned his prison tent into an incubator
of extremism. After release he joined the
armed group he would in 2010 come to
lead. All three of the leaders who preceded
him, including the notorious Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, were killed by U.S. forces in
tandem with the Iraqi government.
That collaboration formed the next
link in the chain that led to al-Baghdadi’s
death. This story is one of professional
cooperation, shared goals and keeping
everyone on the same page. By doctrine
and training, U.S. special- operations
forces work jointly with others, from the
CIA to the Iraqi military and intelligence
and the Syrian Kurds who dispatched
agents along the routes al-Baghdadi was
thought to use, tracing him to a com-
pound near the Turkish border.
The Kurds had a man on the inside,
their general Mazloum Abdi told report-
ers afterward. Abdi said a member of
al-Baghdadi’s security detail smuggled
out soiled underwear, and even a blood
sample, for DNA testing that confirmed
the ISIS leader’s presence. The agent also
described the layout of the compound
in detail, including a tunnel. (The re-
ward for information leading the U.S. to
al-Baghdadi was $25 million.) Planning
began for a capture-or-kill operation car-
ried out by the Army’s elite Delta Force
and Ranger Regiment troops. The mis-
sion was named in part for Kayla Muel-
ler, the U.S. aid worker kidnapped by
ISIS in 2013 and raped by al-Baghdadi.
On Oct. 26, the operation went off
without incident, commandos flying
from Iraq in eight CH-47 Chinooks and
other helicopters, breaching a high wall
surrounding the compound and pursu-
ing al-Baghdadi into the tunnel, a dead
end where he detonated a suicide vest,
killing the two children he’d taken with
him. President Donald Trump watched
the video feeds in the White House Situ-
ation Room “like a movie,” he said in an
announcement the next
morning.But trump himself
had disrupted planning.
His abrupt announce-
ment that the U.S. was
leaving Kurdish terri-
tory in Syria infuriated
the U.S. partners in the
operation. As the U.S.
retreated, and the Kurds
scrambled for their lives
while under attack by
Turkey, raid planners
scrambled to coordinate
logistics, air power and
other military assets re-
quired for the operation
against al-Baghdadi.
And so the impact of al-Baghdadi’s
elimination (and the data recovered
from his compound) is not the only
question left looming in the aftermath
of the raid.
ISIS has operated as an insurgency, a
militia, a government and, perhaps most
dangerously, as a movement, inspiring
followers despite its astonishing brutality.
“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death— welcome
and important though it may be—is not a
catastrophic blow to the quality of lead-
ership in ISIS,” says Michael Nagata,
who retired in August as Army lieuten-
ant general and strategy director from
the National Counter terrorism Center.
Nagata, who served in the Middle East as
a special- operations commander in 2014when the counter-ISIS campaign began,
says ISIS now has a cadre of young,
battle- hardened leaders who are climbing
its echelons and in the terrorist group’s
global network. “ISIS isn’t a crippled or-
ganization because Baghdadi’s gone,”
he says. “The depth and breadth of ISIS
leadership, in my judgment, is unprece-
dented for this type of terrorist group.”
Nor does killing al-Baghdadi re-
verse Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds.
The decision has raised doubts even in
Iraq, where the U.S. lost thousands of
troops and spent $1 trillion. “The stay-
ing power of the United States is being
questioned in a very, very serious way,”
the President of Iraq, Barham Salih,
told Axios in an interview. “And allies of
the United States are worried about the
dependability of the United States.”
Iraq declared that
troops Trump ordered out
of Syria can’t stay there,
opening the question of
how the U.S. will suppress
an ISIS that “is stronger
today than its predeces-
sor al-Qaeda in Iraq was
in 2011, when the U.S.
withdrew from Iraq,” as
the Institute for the Study
of War wrote in a June re-
port. “ISIS’s insurgency
will grow because areas it
has lost in Iraq and Syria
are still neither stable nor
secure.”
After Russian and
Turkish forces took
over territory once held
by the Kurds and Americans, Trump
ordered a rump U.S. force to protect
nearby oil fields. The move underscored
the betrayal of the Kurds and reinforced
perceptions that the West cares most
about resources—never a good outcome
in a contest for hearts and minds. After
al-Baghdadi, there can be no question
such a contest matters.
“It’s good to take out the leader, but
it’s not just a terrorist group—it’s an ide-
ology as well,” says Aki Peritz, a former
CIA counterterrorism analyst. “Stamp-
ing out the idea of the Islamic State will
prove to be much more difficult than
one successful military- intelligence
operation.” —With reporting by john
walcoTT/washingTon □△
An ISIS video released in April
gave the world its first glimpse
of al-Baghdadi in five years