BIDEN APPROVES ATTACK ON ISIS LEADER

 

                                 …Biden & Harris watching attack on ISIS leader

 

Biden waited months to approve attack on ISIS leader

 

By December, it became clear that the United States had located the leader of the Islamic State (ISIS).  In the White House, a group of military commanders arrived in the Situation Room to outline for President Biden how to take down the terrorist target in northwestern Syria.

But it also became clear just how complicated it would be, with the possibility of civilian losses, American troop casualties and other grave risks.

The president, who carries in his breast pocket the precise number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who is criticized for his decisions to leave Afghanistan.  That decisions that added 13 more deaths to his pocket list.  Plus, his late son’s military service that remains a point of his pride, the president was confronted with one of the weightiest decisions of his presidency.

There has been a constant give-and-take among Biden and his military commanders over whether, when and exactly how to go after this Islamic State leader .  All of this culminated last Tuesday morning in the Oval Office.

Biden, had a meeting with the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he authorized his first major counterterrorism operation.  It was a raid, not dissimilar to one that he had opposed more than a decade earlier, which resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden.  By Wednesday evening, following a late-afternoon call with French President Emmanuel Macron, he was pulled into the Situation Room to watch a video feed of the mission being carried out.

“It was very quiet and very tense,” said a senior administration official.  Some got up and began pacing in the room. “There was not a lot of talking,” the official said.

Biden’s final authorization was the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes work by U.S. intelligence and military personnel.

After operatives last fall located the leader, born as: Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla, but he took the name of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, as the leader of the Islamic State militant group.  Biden was briefed in “really exquisite detail” by a small group of senior advisers on Dec. 20 and presented with several options. The objective was to capture, but they knew a likely outcome was to kill the leader.

But Biden and his advisers saw an opportunity to deal a major setback to the Islamic State, a militant terrorist group that some officials have worried is in the midst of a resurgence.

The United States has carried out several operations in recent years in an attempt to track down and kill ISIS leaders as a way of disrupting the group.

U.S. officials hope that Qurayshi’s status as a longtime leader within the terrorist group would make his death a particular blow.  “We anticipate that this is going to lead to disruption within ISIS. He’s really one of the few remaining, shall we call them, ‘legacy leaders,’” said a senior administration official. “And so, this is a continued push that has been underway for quite some time to continue to remove the leadership elements of ISIS.”

This operation was an unusually complex one, the U.S. officials said, because months of surveillance revealed numerous children in the area.  Families lived on the first floor of the complex, apparently unaware that they shared a building with a leading terrorist. Qurayshi rarely came out of the house, aside from going onto the roof to pray.  Instead he relied on couriers to convey his orders to his ISIS fighters.

In December, commanders briefed Biden on exactly how the operation could go, even bringing in a tabletop model of Qurayshi’s compound to emphasize the mission’s complexity.

Biden saw the location as a deliberate choice by Qurayshi, who surrounded himself with women and children to make it harder for the United States to take him down without significant civilian casualties. That led Biden to reshape the mission, directing that it would be carried out by U.S. forces, similar to that of going after Osama bin Laden, by being on the ground, rather than an airstrike.

“We made a choice to pursue a special forces raid at a much greater risk than to our own people,” Biden said. “Rather than targeting him with an airstrike, we made this choice to minimize civilian casualties.”

Adding to the operation’s risky nature was the fact that the area is largely controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a militant group with ties to al-Qaeda.  Russian forces also control some of the airspace that U.S. forces had to travel through. (while they didn’t warn the Russians ahead of time, they used a channel to avoid any misunderstandings or direct clashes between Russia in Syria.).

The debates unfolding inside the Situation Room over the past several months were not entirely different from those that occurred in 2011, when President Barack Obama’s top advisers deliberated whether to send a Navy SEAL team into Pakistan to go after bin Laden

Back then, Biden was among the skeptical voices. At the time, he said more needed to be done to confirm that the al-Qaeda leader was actually in the compound in Pakistan, and he worried about the risk to the American troops. He voiced his dissent internally, according to numerous accounts, although he later claimed that he told Obama privately, “Follow your instincts.”

Obama authorized the raid, whose success became one of the landmark events of his presidency.

Biden’s primary concern was the political consequences of failure,” Robert Gates, Obama’s defense secretary, who was also initially skeptical, later wrote in his book “DUTY”.

The consequences of potential failure this time were also significant. Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan resulted in turbulence and death. In the midst of a chaotic withdrawal, the military authorized a drone strike that killed 10 civilians a result that U.S. officials said was a “horrible mistake.”

Another blunder involving the military would obviously compound Biden’s problems. But still, he seemed to approach this raid differently than he did the raid to capture bin Laden.

“In many ways, it’s the difference between being president and being vice president,” said Leon Panetta, who served as CIA Director and Defense Secretary under Obama. “The vice president can give thoughts and views. But in this situation, he’s the president. He’s got to make the final decision.”

Biden realized that the operation would affect history’s judgment of his presidency, Panetta added.

“In the end, I think the president understands that in many ways his legacy as president is determined by these kinds of decisions,” he said. “He could make the wrong call, and it could turn out to be a disaster. But ultimately he’s got to decide. … If you make the right decision and it works out, you get a hell of a lot of credit for having the courage of making the right decision.”

Biden gave the final authorization for the raid in a meeting in the Oval Office, and military leaders determined that they had the right conditions for the raid. They tend to aim for a night when the moon is dim.

“A lot of factors had to line up to be just right,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. “This was the best window to execute the mission.”

Biden and his top advisers gathered in the Situation Room around 5 PM to monitor the operation unfold in real time. Biden sat at the head table with no suit jacket. Vice President Harris sat to his right.

Others in the room included chief of staff Ron Klain; national security adviser Jake Sullivan; deputy national security adviser Jon Finer; Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa; homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall; and Nancy McEldowney, the vice president’s national security adviser.

They watched a video feed of the operation as it unfolded, along with an open line to the Pentagon, where top military officials were watching the same scene.

Special Operations Forces, who went through dozens of rehearsals of the raid, were set to be on the ground for about two hours.

Upon arrival, the troops used a bullhorn and shouted out their presence. There was relief in the Situation Room when families from the first floor agreed to leave the site and were led to safety. All told, according to U.S. officials, they were able to evacuate 10 people, eight of them children.

But moments later, there was a massive explosion. The terrorist Qurayshi, the U.S. officials said.  He had detonated a bomb on the third floor, killing himself and his family. It was something that U.S. officials had thought was possible, particularly since Qurayshi’s predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also detonated a bomb during a raid that killed him in 2019.

The military even had its engineers assess whether such an explosion would bring down the whole building, concluding correctly, that it would destroy only the top floor.

Biden and his team continued watching as one of the military’s helicopters encountered mechanical problems. The operatives eventually destroyed the helicopter.

As the raid unfolded, Biden talked in the room about how long they all had been trying to combat the Islamic State, recounting his time as vice president. He remarked how they had previously pursued Qurayshi, who Biden said had only one leg since the U.S. launched a strike on him near Mosul in 2015.

“He was on our target list from the earliest days of the campaign,” one senior administration official said.

Throughout the night, Biden received updates from Sullivan on other aspects of the mission. Operatives made a positive identification using facial recognition and, later, fingerprints, but it wasn’t until final confirmation using DNA came around 7 AM the next day that they were ready to announce it to the world.

That morning, Biden delivered remarks from the White House, hailing the work of the military and telling foes of the United States, “We remain vigilant. We remain prepared. … We will come after you and find you.”

But just after the Special Operations team left the ground in Syria and the tense Situation Room began to relax, Biden rose to leave, ending with the same remark he uses to conclude most of his speeches: “God bless our troops.”

Copyright G. Ater 2022