The Islamic State is now “leaderless,” and that’s “a significant blow” to the group’s capabilities, the Pentagon said hours after Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Qurayshi, also known as Hajji Abdullah, killed himself and others as U.S. special operations forces closed in.
Al Qurayshi, who assumed the leadership role after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi killed himself as U.S. troops pursued him, “was a very hands-on leader and involved in many day-to-day operations of ISIS, and [he was] certainly keenly interested in restoring the lethality and a higher tempo that ISIS once enjoyed,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday.
President Joe Biden opted for a raid, which put U.S. troops at greater risk, instead of a strike because al Qurayshi had surrounded himself with civilians in a residential building in northwest Syria. U.S. forces spent roughly two hours at the compound and called out through a bullhorn to encourage civilians, and al Qurayshi himself, to exit the building peacefully.
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A mother, father, and four children left from the first floor, and four more children from the second floor came out before the terrorist leader could detonate a bomb that killed himself, his wife, and his children, Kirby explained. One of al Qurayshi’s lieutenants, whose name hasn’t been released, also lived in the building, and he and his wife fired upon the troops. They were both killed.
“This is not something that we believe ISIS is going to be able to just get over real quickly and real easily,” Kirby added when asked what al Qurayshi’s death meant for their capabilities. He also noted that ISIS, even before the strike, “are not the force that they were in 2014” when they had “growth and rapid acceleration across Iraq and Syria,” though currently, they “still remain a viable threat” that “wants to reconstitute its strength [and] wants to continue to attack and kill and maim and terrorize.”
The strike comes as reverberations are still being felt from an ISIS prison break attempt in Syria only weeks ago. The coordinated attack and subsequent battle with Syrian forces lasted for days and had experts surprised by their capabilities.
Former Ambassador Nathan Sales, who served as ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, told the Washington Examiner that the raid comes “at an important time” because the terror group “had been on a roll in recent weeks and months with the attack on the Hasaka prison.
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“So I think eliminating the leader of the organization comes at a critical time to reverse any momentum that ISIS fighters might have thought they had,” he added. “This isn’t going to be the end of ISIS by any stretch — organizations survive the loss of their leaders — but what this does do is, first of all, demonstrate to ISIS fighters [that] we can find you anywhere [and] we can get you anywhere. And it also is demoralizing to them.”
