The United States military has conducted a special operations raid targeting one of its most high-value targets, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), Newsweek reports. President Donald Trump approved the mission nearly a week before it took place.
Amid reports tonight of U.S. military helicopters over Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, a senior Pentagon official familiar with the operation and Army official briefed on the matter told Newsweek that Baghdadi was the target of the top-secret operation in the last bastion of the country’s Islamist-dominated opposition, a faction that has clashed with ISIS in recent years. A U.S. Army official briefed on the results of the operation told Newsweek that Baghdadi was killed in the raid. And the Defense Department told the White House they have “high confidence” that the high-value target killed was Baghdadi, but further verification is pending.
Members of a team from the Joint Special Operations Command carried out Saturday’s high-level operation after receiving actionable intelligence, according to sources familiar with the operation. The location raided by special operations troops had been under surveillance for some time.
Tonight, after the operation had concluded, President Trump tweeted: “Something very big has just happened!” The White House announced later that the president will make a “major statement” Sunday at 9:00 a.m.
Baghdadi, an Iraqi national, is an ultraconservative cleric who became active in the Islamist insurgency against U.S. forces following the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He was held by U.S. forces in the detention centers of Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, where a number of future jihadi leaders rubbed shoulders while in military custody. He went on to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq, rising up the ranks of the violent group as it merged with others to form the Islamic State of Iraq and eventually inherited its leadership in 2010, when his predecessor was killed in a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation. As the group took advantage of a U.S. military exit to further expand, he renamed the group to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham—or the Levant—better known as ISIS, in 2013, seeking to expand to neighboring Syria, where a civil war was raging.
Read more at Newsweek.
{Matzav.com}
Did Trump use taxpayer dollars to take out Baghdadi without first receiving authorization from the Democratic-led budget committee? If he did, this could be an impeachable offense. According to a whistleblower – who once worked for Joe Biden and the Ukrainian oil company affiliated with Biden’s son – Trump was overheard telling a Defense Department official to take $50,000 out of the defense budget for the operation. The whistleblower then told Biden about it, and Biden said he would hire the Ukrainian prosecutor – who investigated the aforementioned Ukrainian oil company, and who was fired under the directive of Biden – to investigate Trump’s unauthorized use of taxpayer money to hunt down Baghdadi.
Fake news. President Obama killed this guy a long time ago. ISIL has been eliminated by President Obama.
I see Trump is trying to distract the American citizens from his inevitable impeachment & imprisonment, by getting us into wars with the Muslim Nations.
Obama did not kill this guy a long time, just like he didn’t kill Bin Laden. If anything, he CREATED ISIS and President Trump is cleaning up Obama’s mess of destroying ISIS and their leaders.
Money does not pour but humor asks the rest to justify the burden of grace in our villages
I guess this got edited. A war to live became my relationship with a Pakistani arab in college. He was to agitate my class and did obvious offensive things. I did not realize it was a wrong comment. The man exposed himself, punched men in wrong duty and was to me disregard.
I had to confront questions about how jews treated arab children in Israel at age 19 without even being to the holy land. A war to even consider humane.
So sorry Matzav. Maybe this is not a good win for our commentary. Still, what a hard day upon more experience with arabs. Not warranted fully but still odd to consider how I as a jew must be a 2nd class voter in America. It was the experience.
Each one of these comments is gibberish.