The US military has killed a “high-valued target” in Syria believed to be ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Newsweek and Fox News reported on Sunday citing a top US Army official.

Citing sources familiar with the operation,
Newsweek reported that members of the Joint Special Operations Command received “actionable intelligence,” which led them to carry out a special operations raid targeting the ISIS leader in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

CNN cited a US defense official as saying that al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest during the raid. They also reported that the final confirmation as to whether al-Baghdadi was actually targeted is pending while DNA and biometric testing is conducted.

President Donald Trump reportedly approved the operation nearly a week before it took place.

On Saturday, Trump had tweeted without further explanation, “Something very big has just happened!”
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley had said late on Saturday that Trump plans to make a “major statement” at the White House at 9 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) on Sunday.

With a $25 million US bounty on his head, al-Baghdadi is the world’s most wanted man, responsible for steering his chillingly violent organization into mass slaughter of opponents and directing and inspiring terror attacks across continents and in the heart of Europe.

ISIS was defeated in Iraq in 2017, while in Syria, it lost its last territory in March, marking the end of the terrorists’ self-declared caliphate.

Despite these battlefield defeats, ISIS sleeper cells have continued to launch attacks in both Iraq and Syria.

Last April, a propaganda video released by the extremist group’s al-Furqan media network showed a bearded man purporting to be al-Baghdadi sitting cross-legged on the floor, and giving an 18-minute address. This would have been the first appearance of al-Baghdadi since 2014, when he spoke at the Great Mosque in Mosul.

In the video, al-Baghdadi referred in the past tense to the months-long fight for Baghouz at the time, ISIS’s final bastion in eastern Syria.

ISIS in Syria

Trump has faced withering criticism from both Republicans and Democrats alike for his US troop withdrawal from northeastern Syria, which permitted Turkey to attack America’s Kurdish allies.

Many critics of Trump’s Syria pullout have expressed worries that it would lead the ISIS militancy to regain strength and pose a threat to US interests. An announcement about Baghdadi’s death could help blunt those concerns.

Trump was expected to make the statement in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, which he has used to make a number of major announcements.

Just last week he used the same room to announce that a ceasefire between Turkey and the Kurds had taken hold.

For days, US officials had feared that ISIS would seek to capitalize on the upheaval in Syria. But they also saw a potential opportunity, in which ISIS leaders might break from more secretive routines to communicate with operatives, potentially creating a chance for the US and its allies to detect them.

Baghdadi was long thought to hiding somewhere along the Iraq-Syria border. He has led the group since 2010, when it was still an underground al-Qaeda offshoot in Iraq.

On Sept. 16, ISIS’s media network issued a 30-minute audio message purporting to come from Baghdadi, in which he said operations were taking place daily and called on supporters to free women jailed in camps in Iraq and Syria over their alleged links to his group.

In the audio message, Baghdadi also said the US and its proxies had been defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the US had been “dragged” into Mali and Niger.

At the height of its power ISIS ruled over millions of people in territory running from northern Syria through towns and villages along the Tigris and Euphrates valleys to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

But the fall in 2017 of Mosul and Raqqa, its strongholds in Iraq and Syria respectively, stripped Baghdadi, an Iraqi, of the trappings of a caliph and turned him into a fugitive thought to be moving along the desert border between Iraq and Syria.

US air strikes killed most of his top lieutenants, and before ISIS published a video message of Baghdadi in April there had been conflicting reports over whether he was alive.

Despite losing its last significant territory, ISIS is believed to have sleeper cells around the world, and some fighters operate from the shadows in Syria’s desert and Iraq’s cities.