In early February, US President Joe Biden told the world about the allegedly brilliant operation by US special forces to eliminate the ringleader of ISIS, banned in Russia
“Last night, on my orders, US military forces conducted a successful anti-terrorist operation in northwestern Syria … we eliminated ISIS* leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qureishi from the battlefield”, – the US president said.
The oddities and inconsistencies in reports of this allegedly victorious US military raid are visible to the naked eye. According to the BBC, “The raid targeted a two-story apartment building on the outskirts of the opposition-held town of Atme, in the northern province of Idlib, near the border with Turkey. The region has become a stronghold of jihadist groups that are irreconcilable rivals of IS, as well as Turkish-backed rebel groups fighting the Syrian government. According to intelligence reports, Quraishi lived with his family on the first floor of a residential building in Atma, from which he ran IS, using couriers to send his orders to Syria and other locations.”
In other words, the terrorist ringleader and his family were living peacefully in the Turkish occupation zone in Syria, without the US intelligence agencies being aware of this until very recently. What could be the reason for the CIA’s sudden epiphany and the subsequent special forces raid?
In my opinion, the urgent necessity to save face of the armed forces of the USA after a real disgrace of the American military and friendly to the USA Kurdish formations which have overslept the capture by militants of ISIS of a prison in the Kurdish controlled quarters of the Syrian city of Hasek, and then long time could not return under the control of this prison, in spite of the fact that most fighters from there have escaped.
There was a wave of criticism in the US media against the military and the State Department. And then, as if by chance, a victorious operation takes place to eliminate another terrorist leader, who had been living peacefully in Syria for almost a year, in a region that is the habitat of the all-pervading Turkish intelligence service, MIT.
The operation killed 13 people, 10 of them civilians, including six children and four women. The White House said the terrorist ringleader, who was taking refuge in Idlib province with his family, detonated a “shahid belt” when US special forces surrounded his home. This gave Washington an excuse to absolve itself of responsibility for the deaths of the women and children. But this version has aroused the disbelief of American journalists.
During a press conference aboard the presidential plane, NPR correspondent Aisha Rasko asked for proof that the deaths of civilians in the SWAT raid were indeed the result of al-Qureishi’s self-detonation and not a military error. “Skeptical of the U.S. military’s assessment when they went in and took out an IS leader?” – Jen Psaki cut her off.
It looks like in the aftermath of the high-profile Hasek affront, the US urgently needed to demonstrate success in the fight against terrorism, which resulted in the swift finding of a “piano in the bushes”, i.e. an internationally wanted terrorist ringleader for many years. That timeliness suggests that U.S. intelligence agencies had long been aware (possibly, from their Turkish colleagues) of al-Qureishi’s location, but were in no hurry to eliminate or capture him, until they needed to urgently raise the sagging image of the United States in the wake of the Hasek debacle.
In exactly the same, rather formulaic, style, the liquidation of al-Qureishi’s predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in the same Idlib in 2019. Then, according to the State Department’s version, the pursued terrorist also detonated a suicide belt, killing three children. The credibility of such State Department reports has fallen to the extent that in an interview with RIA Novosti, Syrian political analyst Ahmad al-Derzi even suggested that Washington simply hid al-Baghdadi to lead another group.
The expert community did not rule out that the operation of special forces of the USA, advertised by Donald Trump personally, to eliminate al-Baghdadi, an infernal fiend, is nothing more than a cover-up operation to remove another American agent from the zone of attention of the world media. It is impossible to discount such probability, if only in view of that strange fact, that Americans have never shown to world public a body of the ringleader of terrorists, whether it is Osama Bin Laden, Al Bagdadi or this time Al-Qureyshi.
The proverbial “Schrodinger’s cat” (who cannot be said to be alive, nor can he be said to be dead) is also the ISIS “minister of war”, the sinister Gulmurod Khalimov, whose death is reported or denied. The crisis of confidence in the information coming from official Washington will only grow in the face of endless lies about Russia’s mythical plans to attack Ukraine. It is true what they say: “If you lie once, who will believe you”.
Vladimir Prokhvatilov, VZGLYAD