Who is Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the Islamic State leader who was killed?

Biden said Qurayshi, the Islamic State leader, was “taken off the battlefield” in the raid. He was named “caliph” after Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died in similar fashion in a 2019 U.S. raid. Qurayshi was once described by the U.S. government as a chatty informant who divulged details to U.S. forces on a group formally called al-Qaeda in Iraq and that later spawned the Islamic State. Captured in late 2007 or early 2008, he spent months in an American detention camp in Iraq and was known as detainee M060108-01 in confidential interrogation reports published last year. The Defense Department documents painted a picture of a prolific, at times “cooperative” informant who offered U.S. forces information that helped them fight a terrorist organization that he went on to lead.

Where is Idlib, and what’s the link to al-Qaeda?

Idlib is a rural province in northwestern Syria that borders Turkey and is dotted with camps housing millions of displaced Syrians. It is the last stronghold of opposition to Assad, who after a decade of war has gained back control of much of the country with the help of Russia and Iran. In recent years, Idlib has been battered by a string of military offensives by Damascus and its allies. The U.S. military has also conducted other strikes against Islamist militant targets around there, though the area is not held by the Islamic State, which lost its grip over its last patch of territory in Syria in 2019. Instead, the dominant militant faction in Idlib today is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which Washington classifies as a terrorist organization. HTS’s predecessor, Jabhat al-Nusra, was an al-Qaeda affiliate started around 2011 and initially aligned with the Islamic State. After several years, however, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda formally split and, in the fighting that followed, Jabhat al-Nusra stayed allied with the latter. That was until 2016, when the Islamist group’s leader announced that it was splitting from al-Qaeda and rebranding as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. A year later, it changed its name again to HTS after merging with several other groups. Most recently, HTS has been fighting a new al-Qaeda affiliate in Idlib, Hurras al-Din. Caught in the middle of this violence are millions of displaced Syrians living in extreme poverty and deprivation in northwestern Syria. Though HTS is now largely in control, over the years an array of competing factions have come and gone, as have troops from Turkey, which has backed some of these rebel groups.

Who was former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

Baghdadi led the Islamic State for nearly a decade, overseeing the terrorist group’s brutal rise to power and subsequent territorial defeat until his death in 2019 during a U.S. raid. Born Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri in Iraq in 1971, Baghdadi initially studied to be a religious scholar but instead joined the insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq shortly after the 2003 invasion. U.S. forces arrested Baghdadi in 2004 and sent him to a detention center, where he became friendly with allies of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of a group called al-Qaeda in Iraq. After his release later in 2004, Baghdadi joined up with Zarqawi and in the following years rose in the ranks of al-Qaeda in Iraq. By 2010, Zarqawi and his two successors had been killed by U.S. and Iraqi forces, and Baghdadi took over the organization’s reins. By 2013, Baghdadi had rebranded the militant group as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which, in the following two years, went on to conquer large swaths of the two countries and control a territory equivalent to the size of Britain. Feared and loathed for his brutality, Baghdadi was rarely seen in public and only periodically made appearances and released recordings to encourage his supporters and prove that he was still alive. Baghdadi continued to lead the Islamic State through the U.S.-led coalition’s fight to oust the group and its complete loss of territory. He died when he blew himself up during the 2019 U.S. raid on his compound in northwestern Syria. The blast also killed members of his family.

What do we know about the raid’s casualties?

The exact identities of all 13 people reportedly killed and the exact causes of their deaths remain unknown. The White Helmets, a Syrian civil defense group working in areas of the country outside of the government’s control, said its members had retrieved 13 bodies from the targeted house, including those of six children and four women. Biden himself confirmed the death of Qurayshi, whose body was identified using fingerprints and a DNA sample. There were no reported U.S. casualties. U.S. officials said most of the deceased died on the floor of the house where Qurayshi detonated the bomb, though some casualties also resulted from a shootout elsewhere in the building between U.S. forces and an Islamic State lieutenant and his wife. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said later Thursday that it had confirmed at least three civilian deaths, including Qurayshi’s wife and two children who he said were killed by the bomb Qurayshi detonated. Kirby said that the lieutenant in the gunfight was killed and that a child might have also been killed on the same floor. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said one HTS member was killed in other armed clashes that broke out, though HTS does not appear to have been a specific target. U.S. officials have not yet said who else in the region might have known about the mission or provided intelligence.

How many U.S. troops are in Syria and what are they doing?

Washington has an estimated 900 U.S. troops in Syria stationed in a different part of the country from the site of the latest raid. U.S. forces have largely been scattered in an expanse of northeastern Syria under the control of Syrian Kurdish fighters, who have battled the Islamic State with U.S. help since 2014. A small contingent is also garrisoned at the lone Tanf outpost farther south near a crossing on the Syrian-Iraqi border, where they have at times faced off with Iranian-backed militias. In a surprise tweet in late 2018 , President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of all 2,000 troops deployed alongside Kurdish fighters as part of a U.S.-led coalition of countries that helped end the Islamic State’s territorial rule. The move was widely criticized as a betrayal of U.S. allies. Ultimately, Washington cut the force by about half in a partial pullout. Although the Islamic State has been weakened beyond its ability to capture territory as it did in 2014, it has maintained a network of sleeper cells that have carried out attacks in Syria and Iraq, including just in January at a prison in northeastern Syria, where the U.S.-led coalition bombed the militants from the air. Along with the extended mission against the Islamic State threat, U.S. officials have indicated that forces could remain in Syria in a bid to halt Iran’s expansion across the Middle East. The Trump administration had also said it partly kept troops there in a bid to protect oil fields from the Islamic State. The U.S. military role in Syria has come under scrutiny at home and abroad for a range of reasons, including the civilian casualties in the offensive against the Islamic State in the northeast and east, and a lack of transparency around the toll in U.S. airstrikes.

Middle East

Who is the ISIS leader killed in the U.S. raid? Here’s what to know about Qurayshi and northern Syria.

By Ellen Francis

Adela Suliman

and

Miriam Berger

Updated February 3, 2022 at 1:47 p.m. EST|Published February 3, 2022 at 10:49 a.m. EST

Syrians gather on Feb. 3 at the scene of an overnight raid by U.S. Special Operations forces against suspected Islamist militants in northwestern Syria. (Aaref Watad/AFP/Getty Images)

U.S. Special Operations forces conducted a counterterrorism mission overnight in northwestern Syria that resulted in the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the Islamic State, President Biden announced Thursday.

Residents described an early-morning assault with helicopters and machine gun fire in the Idlib region, where first responders working in a part of Syria outside government control said they retrieved 13 dead bodies, including those of six children and four women. Biden said Qurayshi detonated a large explosion that killed members of his family and himself as the raid was underway.

The more-than-a-decade-long conflict in Syria, which erupted after a crackdown on protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has drawn in world powers, divided the country into a patchwork of territories, caused the deaths of thousands of people and created a refugee crisis of historic scope. Here’s what to know about Qurayshi, the U.S. military’s role in the country and the region where he was killed.

U.S. officials say Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi killed himself and his family in an explosion (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: AP/The Washington Post)

U.S. military raid kills ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in Syria, Biden says