Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his family slept soundly in their beds, protected by several handpicked gunmen who patrolled the grounds of the nondescript compound near the Turkish frontier in northern Syria where the self-proclaimed, so-called Caliph was hiding. The bodyguards did not have to be told that danger lurked in the darkness—the “Ninjas,” the local slang for the enemy’s special operations forces, preferred to launch their daring raids under the cover of a night sky. The sentries moved about cautiously—avoiding areas near the main gate and the house that were booby-trapped with explosives—and they listened attentively to the winds that howled across the hilltops in order to dissect anything was out of the ordinary. They heard nothing, not even the forewarning of a mountain dog barking at the shadows. The night was silent, and the ISIS gunmen were determined to make it safely through to dawn’s first light and morning prayers.
But close to 100 operators from the U.S. Army’s Combat Applications Group, one of the mysterious cover names for the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, along with elements of the 75th Ranger Regiment (Airborne) had already converged on the lair, concealed in stealth and the daring black of night. They had been flown to Barisha from a staging area in Iraq, near Erbil, inside the Kurdistan Regional Government, courtesy of eight helicopters—Chinooks and Black Hawks—from the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) known as the Night Stalkers, and their seventy-minute-long path in the darkness had been illuminated by the best type and most reliable form of actionable intelligence—the human kind. A source entrenched inside al-Baghdadi’s entourage had been turned and he provided accurate and up-to-date information on Baghdadi’s whereabouts and movements. The raid had been in the works for close to two weeks.
The Delta Strike Force landed near the compound and quickly surrounded the perimeter. An Arabic-speaker used a megaphone to plead with those behind the walls to come out and surrender, but gunfire erupted. Delta breachers, having been told that the main iron gate was wired with an IED, blew a hole in a spot along the fence in order to gain access to al-Baghdadi’s compound. The rest was merely a matter of pinpoint precision and the kind of tactical proficiency few in this world possess, plus raw and undefinable courage. While one Delta team disposed of al-Baghdadi’s sentries with a flurry of fire, an element of the raiding party seized two high-ranking ISIS prisoners; another team of Delta operators also whisked eleven children to safety and out of the kill zone. Baghdadi, awakened by the blasts and cadence of selective automatic fire, raced toward a ditch that led to an irrigation tunnel with two children in tow. Delta operators and K-9 handlers followed in close pursuit. Cornered underground, al-Baghdadi reportedly detonated a suicide vest he wore strapped to his torso to ensure that he wouldn’t be taken alive, killing himself and the two children.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the world’s most wanted terrorist, a self-anointed king who inspired countless suicidal subjects. But by the time he detonated the capture-proof explosive payload, his roundtable of lieutenants, the men who built the so-called Caliphate and led his army that shocked the world with their unimaginable crimes, had been killed in a combined Jordanian and American intelligence and special operations campaign to avenge the life of a young F-16 pilot whose ghastly murder was a turning point in the global war on terror.
This is the remarkable story of how the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came to an end.