How Baghdadi was found

Over the past three days, several details have emerged about how the United States discovered the hideout of the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Baghdadi died during the night between Saturday and Sunday during an operation by US special forces near Barisha, a town in northwestern Syria, near the border with Turkey. The White House did not give much information on the research that allowed Baghdadi to be located: President Donald Trump limited himself to thank Russia and Turkey for allowing US helicopters to fly over Turkish airspace and that of northwest Syria, controlled by the Russians, and Iraq and the Syrian Kurds for intelligence information transmitted to the United States.

However, several journalists have reconstructed some parts of the research in recent months. From the information available, it appears that the contribution of Kurdish and Iraqi intelligence has been much more relevant than Trump and some of his government members have publicly admitted.

On Monday, for example, Polat Can, advisor to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, the anti-ISIS coalition formed by Arabs and Kurds), said that in the small circle of Baghdadi there was a man who was passing on information to the SDF: it is not clear if it was a spy infiltrated or had "betrayed" Baghdadi, as claimed by an article in Guardian. Polat Can wrote: "One of our sources managed to reach the house where Baghdadi was hiding. Baghdadi changed houses very often. He was about to move to a new place in Jerablus, a city on the border with Turkey. Polat Can said that Baghdadi had been identified with certainty after DNA analysis of a pair of white boxers taken from the ISIS leader by the man who worked for the Kurds. The source in question would also have contributed to the success of the operation on Saturday night by sending data and contact details to the US military involved.

Even the head of the SDF, General Mazloum Kobani, spoke of a source that passed information to the Kurds. Mazloum confirmed a NBC that during the operation the SDF agent was in the building where Baghdadi was hiding, for which he worked as a security advisor.

Other important information to locate Baghdadi came from Iraqi intelligence, wrote journalist Bel Trew among others.Independent. According to the reconstruction of Trew and other journalists, Baghdadi was to arrive in the building near Barisha five days before the operation, but had been in Idlib province for several months.

Fadel Abo Raghif, an expert on radical movements at the Wasatiyyah Center in Malaysia, said that much information came from Muhammad Ali Sajid al Zobaie, Baghadi's brother-in-law arrested long ago by Iraqi security forces. The man had indicated to the Iraqis a tunnel near the city of Qaim, in central Iraq near the border with Syria, in which several objects were found that had helped to locate Baghdadi, including light weapons, religious books and maps hand drawn. Hisham Hashimi, an ISIS expert, said the operation had allowed the Iraqis to gather information on the underground network that Baghdadi was using in the Idlib area of ​​northwest Syria to get some of its relatives out of the country and bring them into Turkey .

It is not yet known with certainty what Baghdadi was doing in Idlib province, a territory controlled for years by extremist groups enemy of ISIS. According to some analysts, including Hashimi, Baghdadi was there to meet Abu Mohamed al Halabi, owner of the building where the head of the ISIS was hiding and a member of Hurras al Din, a group linked to al Qaida and charged with carrying out attacks in West (the story of Hurras al Din is told more extensively here).

The house in which Halabi was located had been built in early 2018 over a complex network of underground tunnels, one of which was used by Baghdadi to attempt escape during the US operation on Saturday night.

According to the reconstruction of Trew, journalist of theIndependent, and according to some information gathered by Iraqi intelligence, Baghdadi was meeting Halabi precisely because of the clandestine network that the latter had set up on the border between Turkey and Syria: the goal was to encourage the escape of some family members from Baghdadi. Martin Chulov, envoy of Guardian in the Middle East, he wrote that in mid-September Iraqi officials had identified a Syrian who had dealt with the transfer of the wives of the two brothers from Baghdadi, Ahmad and Jumah, and the children of the same head of the ISIS. Iraqi intelligence sources said they had obtained various information from the Syrian man, a woman, probably his wife, and one of Baghdadi's nephews. This information was then passed to the CIA.

Other experts have instead hypothesized that the meeting served the two leaders to talk about a possible collaboration between the two groups, in a moment of difficulty for both. For the moment there is no reliable information, or at least it has not been made public.

Baghdadi's brother-in-law and the men involved in trafficking in people were not the only ones to pass on relevant information to Iraq. Iraqi intelligence sources told Reuters to have obtained other data from Ismael al Ethawi, an important Baghdadi collaborator arrested long ago by the Turks and then handed over to the Iraqis. Ethawi would reveal several details about the meetings that Baghdadi held in Syria with five of his collaborators, including himself, and about the places where these meetings took place. Ethawi's testimony would have been crossed with other information that the Iraqis had previously obtained from several ISIS leaders arrested in early 2019 in a joint intelligence operation in the United States, Turkey and Iraq.

Always second Reuters, another important moment in Baghdadi's research may have been the capture of an important member of ISIS by Hayat Tahrir al Sham, a radical radical group that dominates Idlib province. According to a commander of Idlib quoted by Reuters, the captured man would be Abu Suleiman al Khalidi, one of the three people sitting near Baghdadi in his last video message. The commander of Idlib said that the capture of Khalidi was "the key" in Baghdadi's research, effectively suggesting that Hayat Tahrir al Sham may have passed the information obtained to intelligence agencies (for example to the Turkish ones, since according to several local inhabitants of the area would have contact with the extremist group).

It is very likely that the United States planned the Saturday night operation based on many other information that was not made public, some of which were obtained directly from the Americans themselves and the use of technology, as Trump said during the press conference. held Sunday at the White House. Chulov, journalist of the Guardian, wrote that for the men of Delta Force that of Saturday was "the largest and most dangerous operation of all those carried out in the war against ISIS".