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al Baghdadi is dead (1 Viewer)

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File this under: "There is always a tweet!"

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump · Oct 22, 2012

Stop congratulating Obama for killing Bin Laden. The Navy Seals killed Bin Laden. #debate

I agree with Trump.  There.  I said it.

 
The way she’s handled herself since he’s been President looking for any manufactured excuse to try to take him down there are a million reasons she shouldn’t have been informed and seems to have gone awfully well without her. 
Spot on. She’s made a mockery of the house she supposedly leads. 

 
Of course - that then begs the question - if the raid did not start until 6:10 ET - what were Trump and his guy pals staring at so intently at 5:05 ET? 
Also if this was in the works for well in advance of the Saturday raid, why even go golfing that day?  Really can't take a day off the links?

 
Spot on. She’s made a mockery of the house she supposedly leads. 
Agree completely, she has a very sufficient track record of doing anything she can to undermine Trump and I think they handled this the correct way and fortunately it was a great success. 

 
Also if this was in the works for well in advance of the Saturday raid, why even go golfing that day?  Really can't take a day off the links?
I don't have a problem with this. (sans the number of golf days Trump takes, which is a different discussion). I think once the decision to move forward was made, you let the professionals handle all the planning. Go to the golf course to clear your mind and prepare for the seriousness of what you are about to do. 

 
Agree completely, she has a very sufficient track record of doing anything she can to undermine Trump and I think they handled this the correct way and fortunately it was a great success. 
Great success because the dirty Dems were kept out of it. They simply don’t deserve a spot at the big table anymore. 

 
I don't have a problem with this. (sans the number of golf days Trump takes, which is a different discussion). I think once the decision to move forward was made, you let the professionals handle all the planning. Go to the golf course to clear your mind and prepare for the seriousness of what you are about to do. 
Yep, sounds like you are dead on. No problem with it at all, makes plenty of sense.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-baghdadi-in-their-sights-us-troops-launch-a-dangerous-and-daring-nighttime-raid/2019/10/27/6c88a484-f8d0-11e9-9534-e0dbcc9f5683_story.html

 
This is one perspective. I’d say it’s a step forward for the civilized world. According to NYT, Trump took credit despite the fact that his erratic actions seem to have interfered with planning after the same IC he disparages got intel this summer, and Trump disrupted planning.

Trump then claimed this raid was far greater than the one that killed Bin Laden.

Embarrassing. Trump is no leader.
You can't change the past. So, I think you have to accept today as a win and move forward.

 
Trump on the World Series game tonight - 200k people showed up to see me on the big screen and I awarded them a little baseball.   

 
Great clip because it baselines applause versus boos versus applause again. He did not expect that, and it will crumble his narcissistic world
Let’s monitor this and see how it plays out. With how the games is going maybe they should play footage of the raid on the big screen. 

 
This should be an issue that everyone, regardless of politics, sees as a good thing. It won’t be the end of ISIS, and I’m sure someone is going to take over in his place within the next week if it hasn’t already happened. Hopefully in the raid we gathered a lot of intelligence

 
Headlines....like this one from the WAPO...

"Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48."

 
I am very happy that this man is dead and I congratulated President Trump yesterday; I stand by that. 

However, after watching  excerpts from his press conference (I didn’t watch it yesterday) I think there are some things to criticize: 

1. Trump mocked al-Baghdadi, said that he died like a dog. This word has terrible connotations in the Muslim world; it is considered the greatest insult. This will inflame radical Muslims, along with Trump’s general gloating. When Osama bin Laden was killed, Obama warned against any kind of celebratory rhetoric: “We’re not spiking the ball,” he said. I firmly believe that was the wiser move. 

2. Terrorists in ISIS and al -Qaeda, in order to recruit the young to their cause, have long argued that the USA’s presence in the Middle East is only because we want the oil. We have strongly denied this. However, yesterday President Trump said that the only reason we would now keep any military in Syria was to protect the oil fields, and he further suggested, against international law, that we could use that oil however we wished- perhaps we would sell it to others or consume it ourselves. This sort of language is basically a poster board for the ISIS locker room. 

One step forward, two steps back. 

 
Trump’s Syria Troop Withdrawal Complicated Plans for al-Baghdadi Raid

tldr version:

- Sounds like the US learned of Baghdadi's presence in Barisha earlier this summer.

- The Kurds delivered him.

- The US & Kurds were in a now or never situation to get him.

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.

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!”


 

 
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I am very happy that this man is dead and I congratulated President Trump yesterday; I stand by that. 

However, after watching  excerpts from his press conference (I didn’t watch it yesterday) I think there are some things to criticize: 

1. Trump mocked al-Baghdadi, said that he died like a dog. This word has terrible connotations in the Muslim world; it is considered the greatest insult. This will inflame radical Muslims, along with Trump’s general gloating. When Osama bin Laden was killed, Obama warned against any kind of celebratory rhetoric: “We’re not spiking the ball,” he said. I firmly believe that was the wiser move. 

2. Terrorists in ISIS and al -Qaeda, in order to recruit the young to their cause, have long argued that the USA’s presence in the Middle East is only because we want the oil. We have strongly denied this. However, yesterday President Trump said that the only reason we would now keep any military in Syria was to protect the oil fields, and he further suggested, against international law, that we could use that oil however we wished- perhaps we would sell it to others or consume it ourselves. This sort of language is basically a poster board for the ISIS locker room. 

One step forward, two steps back. 
Add in the public claiming that Pelosi would leak information on such a thing...and a multitude of other Trump like things...and the press conference was a mess.  That is what happens when he speaks.

 
I am very happy that this man is dead and I congratulated President Trump yesterday; I stand by that. 

However, after watching  excerpts from his press conference (I didn’t watch it yesterday) I think there are some things to criticize: 

1. Trump mocked al-Baghdadi, said that he died like a dog. This word has terrible connotations in the Muslim world; it is considered the greatest insult. This will inflame radical Muslims, along with Trump’s general gloating. When Osama bin Laden was killed, Obama warned against any kind of celebratory rhetoric: “We’re not spiking the ball,” he said. I firmly believe that was the wiser move. 

2. Terrorists in ISIS and al -Qaeda, in order to recruit the young to their cause, have long argued that the USA’s presence in the Middle East is only because we want the oil. We have strongly denied this. However, yesterday President Trump said that the only reason we would now keep any military in Syria was to protect the oil fields, and he further suggested, against international law, that we could use that oil however we wished- perhaps we would sell it to others or consume it ourselves. This sort of language is basically a poster board for the ISIS locker room. 

One step forward, two steps back. 
Add in the public claiming that Pelosi would leak information on such a thing...and a multitude of other Trump like things...and the press conference was a mess.  That is what happens when he speaks.
In the end, it is great that this terrorist is dead.

 
...The raid by the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, known as Delta Force, was carried out Oct. 26 after a complicated CIA intelligence-collection operation aided by Syrian Kurdish forces and other U.S. partners in the region, including Iraqi Kurdistan, a senior U.S. administration official told Foreign Policy. 

The operation, which involved helicopters and U.S. special operations forces on the ground, was launched from Erbil, Iraq, and inside Syria, the official said. 

...Baghdadi’s death is a victory for Trump and his national security team, who have spent years hunting the world’s most wanted terrorist.  But officials and experts said it would not undo the damage caused by the president’s early October decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the Turkey-Syria border, which precipitated a violent Turkish operation in northeast Syria. Thousands of ISIS fighters and family members remain in makeshift camps across the region guarded by the SDF.

 The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) spent five months working with the U.S. government to gather intelligence on Baghdadi’s whereabouts, according to Kurdish and U.S. officials. Gen. Mazloum Abdi, SDF commander, was the only foreigner to know about the target, he told Foreign Policy through a translator. His account was confirmed independently by the senior U.S. official.

The operation was delayed for a full month by Turkey’s military activity at the border and the subsequent incursion into northeastern Syria, Mazloum said. Ankara moved into Syria days after Trump withdrew U.S. forces from the border in early October, a move that was widely seen as a green light for the Turkish operation.

“Trump rejected [intelligence community] assessments and spilled classified intelligence, cut off our military operations at its knees with unplanned decisions like Syria, repeatedly treated Iraq with indifference, and appeared ready to throw out the relationship with the SDF only a few weeks ago,” said Stroul.

“Yet this operation relied on U.S. intelligence  our military in Syria and Iraq, intelligence breakthroughs by the Iraqi government, and an intelligence network cultivated by the SDF at U.S. request.”

The Delta Force operation that led to Baghdadi’s death would have been “extremely difficult” to pull off without a presence on the ground, said one senior U.S. official, who criticized Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw all but a few hundred U.S. forces from Syria.

Baghdadi’s death is “a blow to ISIS especially following the defeat of the caliphate. But the fight against ISIS is not over,” the official said. “We are less safe for withdrawing our forces in Syria.”

Meanwhile, reports emerged that Baghdadi’s right-hand man, Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, an Islamic State spokesman, was targeted in a separate operation conducted jointly by SDF intelligence and the US military. Mazloum said Muhajir was targeted near Ayn al-Bayda, close to Turkish-controlled Jarablus in the Aleppo province. U.S. officials have not yet confirmed the operation.

...Baghdadi was hiding out in Idlib province in northwestern Syria, in an area controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadi rebel group hostile to the Islamic State, when the Delta Force operation began, according to the senior U.S. official. 

...

The SDF, which has fought the Islamic State alongside the United States and others since 2015, contributed to the operation through a network of human intelligence throughout northern Syria, according to U.S. and Kurdish sources. Though Idlib is controlled primarily by Syrian rebels and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—formerly known as the Nusra Front, the Syrian arm of al Qaeda—the SDF has “many sympathizers and informers” there, a Kurdish source said. 

In March, a spokesperson for the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which makes up the backbone of the SDF, said their intelligence indicated Baghdadi was in Idlib. 

“Successful& historical operation due to a joint intelligence work with the United States of America,” tweeted Mazloum.

The United States informed Turkey of the operation ahead of time to prevent an unintended clash of forces but did not specify the target due to concerns the information would be compromised, the U.S. official said. Ankara did not play a role in the operation. 

“Turkey did not provide any assistance in this operation and he was located right next to their border,” the official said. “That shows you how little they do on countering ISIS.” 

...

Turkey earlier this month invaded northeastern Syria in an operation that has killed hundreds of Kurdish civilians and fighters. The Kurds were guarding tens of thousands of Islamic State prisoners and family members living in camps across the region. 

In a temporary cease-fire agreement brokered by the United States, Turkey vowed to continue routing out the Islamic State in Syria. However, a large number of Islamic State detainees have been able to escape during the operation, including some who were deliberately freed by Turkish-backed forces. Many of them have ties to extremist groups.

In a statement, the SDF warned of the continuing dangers from ISIS and Turkish-backed forces in Syria.

“We warn the world of the danger that jihadi factions with the Turkish army may enter Ras al-Ain and Tel Abyad areas occupied by Turkey-backed militias and that the region could become another safe-haven in which ISIS may find opportunities to re-organize,” according to the statement. “We have already indicated that IS members and some senior leaders of the group have already moved to areas controlled by Turkish army in northern Syria.”

Reports emerged Sunday that Iraq claimed to have provided Baghdadi’s exact location. However, the U.S. official disputed that account, saying the operation was triggered by him showing up at a place where the team had already established intelligence collection.
- FP

 
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Great news that he is dead and will give Trump credit for that.  I still think his policy in Syria will make us less safe but killing this butcher is great news that I think we can all get behind.  

 
Done with this one. And yes, this thread is exactly what we don't want. I had people point to this as exactly why the forum should go.

I don't celebrate anyone's death. But trying to spin something like eliminating a top terror threat into scoring your own political points is not what we want here. Do better. 

 
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