Operation Kayla Mueller: How Baghdadi was killed and what happens next

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph of the Islamic State on July 4, 2014. In the five years that have since passed, thousands of civilians have been killed by the group’s bloody reign in parts of Iraq and Syria, as the caliphate stretched across a region the size of the United Kingdom and conducted terror attacks across the world.

But, by February 2019, the battle of Baghuz Fawqani ended ISIS’s reign in Syria and took out the last bastion of the terrorist outfit in the country—although fighters remained scattered across the country.

On Sunday, October 27, US President Donald Trump announced that the “world’s number one terrorist leader” and leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had killed himself after being chased down by US special forces.

The operation that killed Baghdadi

White House national security advisor Robert O’Brien stated that the mission was called ‘Operation Kayla Mueller’—named after an American human rights worker who was taken hostage by ISIS in 2013.

Mueller had travelled to the Turkey/Syria border in 2012 to work with the Danish Refugee Council and the NGO Support to Life. She had a long history of volunteer work, having done so earlier in the West Bank in Israel as well as in India where she taught English to Tibetan refugees.

She was kidnapped by ISIS after a Doctors Without Borders convoy carrying her was ambushed. Multiple attempts by US forces to rescue her were unsuccessful. In 2015, the New York Times reported that she had been forcefully married to Baghdadi and reportedly raped. Her death was confirmed that year; her body was never recovered.

Trump’s address announcing the death of a most-wanted terrorist was far less restrained than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, who made a similar announcement in 2011 to break the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

The president spoke in detail of Baghdadi’s death by his own suicide vest, “whimpering and screaming” as US military dogs chased him down a dead-end tunnel. On details of the operation, Trump revealed the following: it took place past midnight on a Sunday morning, involved eight gunships and an unknown number of US special forces, and was indirectly a consequence of Russian, Turkish, Syrian and Kurdish cooperation.

Reportedly, the operation involved twin-rotor CH47 ‘Chinook’ helicopters—designed for troop and cargo transport—and US fighter jets. By contrast, the operation that killed Bin Laden relied on a hitherto-undisclosed stealthy variant of the MH-60 ‘Black Hawk’ helicopter. Russia claimed that US drones and fighter jets were also detected over the region at the time.

US forces took off from Erbil in Northern Iraq and flew through a region that included parts of Kurdish controlled Syria, Turkey, and finally, the Idlib governorate controlled by rebels hostile to the Bashar al-Assad regime. The flight took an hour and ten minutes according to Trump, and the gunships flew “low and fast”—possibly in a bid to avoid radar so as not to have their location determined by regional governments.

Locals reported that the helicopters fired upon the village for 30 minutes before commencing the attack. Special forces blew a hole into the walls of the compound to enter, rather than using the main gate which they feared was booby-trapped.

Baghdadi’s forces were soon overwhelmed, and the leader himself attempted to escape through a network of underground tunnels. He took three children and fled into one tunnel, which turned out to be a dead-end while being pursued by military dogs and a ‘military robot’ (which was mostly unused during the operation).

Baghdadi detonated his vest, killing himself and the three children, and collapsing the walls of the tunnel. The US forces conducted a brief DNA analysis on the spot, determining that it was him within 15 minutes (a pace that suggests the existence of more advanced DNA testing methods that are currently known, as normally, DNA tests can take over an hour. They gathered sensitive data from the region and left, following which fighter jets levelled the buildings there.

Later on Sunday, the SDF and US forces killed ISIS Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, ISIS’s spokesperson, after a coordinated operation in the Ein al Baat village near Jaraboul city.

The intelligence that trapped Baghdadi

The operation was widely reported to have taken place in the village of Barisha in the Idlib governorate, a region on Syria’s northwest that borders Turkey.

According to the New York Times, the information that led to Baghdadi’s arrest came from the interrogation of one of his wives and from a courier. Trump said Baghdadi had been under surveillance for a couple of weeks, with “good information” that he was planning to leave, but that he kept changing his mind.

American officials were reportedly surprised by the location, which is dominated by Al-Qaeda forces hostile to ISIS. Experts fear Baghdadi’s presence there suggests a budding truce between Al-Qaeda and the remnants of ISIS.

The roles that different actors played in the raid grew murky following Trump’s speech. While Trump thanked the Kurds, along with Russia, Turkey and Syria for “certain support they were able to give us”, the official account of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) was far more explicit about the role that Kurds played in this operation, tweeting:

“For five months, there was intelligence work on the ground and a thorough surveillance until a joint operation eliminated terrorist Abu Bakr #Al_Baghdadi. We thank everyone who contributed to this great work".

The Kurds were not the only ones to claim a role in making Operation Kayla Mueller a success. The Iraq Defence Ministry tweeted that its National Intelligence Service helped pinpoint Baghdadi’s hideout in Idlib, while a presidential spokesman from Turkey said that the Turkish military was in “intense coordination” with US counterparts for the operation.

Russia issued a lukewarm response, at first questioning whether the raid really killed Baghdadi (stating that this was the ‘umpteenth’ report of his death) and later saying that, if it happened, it was a major effort from Donald Trump in the war against ISIS.

What happens next?

On Monday, Trump told reporters at the Joint Base Andrews that portions of the video of the raid that killed Baghdadi may be released—something he said he would like to do in his initial address, for followers and “young kids” across the world who leave their countries to join ISIS, to see how he died. “He didn’t die a hero,” Trump said.

The idea of using the raid as a propaganda tool to deter future recruits to ISIS keeps in consideration the very real probability that the group could make a comeback. Hundreds of its fighters who were once-prisoners of the SDF were realised in the chaos following the Turkish invasion in northeastern Syria.

But, even as ISIS faced a murky future in Syria in its final moments, its ambit was aimed outwards. According to the Institute for the Study of War, Baghdadi spent his final year preparing to give ISIS its global expansion, targeting regions like South Asia and Western and Central Africa.

The Idlib region where he was captured was supposed to have been cleared of extremists by Turkey, as part of an agreement with Russia. However, little action has taken place on that front, even as Russia has been bombarding parts of the governorate. As the last province held by rebels in Syria, the Idlib region faces the threat of an offensive by Syrian government forces. Experts believe that Russia’s deal with Turkey to create a ‘safe-zone’ in Syria’s northeastern region unofficially included a quid pro quo to leave the northwestern part bordering Turkey for Syrian forces.

One likely successor to Baghdadi is mentioned on the website of the US State Department’s Rewards for Justice program, where information about terrorists is listed with the promise of a financial reward if tips lead to their capture.

Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla is described as one of ISIS’s most senior ideologues and a “potential successor” to Baghdadi. Mawla reportedly drove and justified the “abduction, slaughter and trafficking of the Yazidi religious minority” in northwest Iraq—crimes that the United Nations has since dubbed a genocide.

The reward for Baghdadi was $25 million, matching what was offered for Bin Laden earlier. Baghdadi’s page on the site has since been taken down.