Baby comforts were inside — a stuffed bunny, a blue plastic swing, a crib. So was the paraphernalia of violence — such as the bomb Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi is said by U.S. officials to have used to blow up himself, his family and perhaps others in his immediate proximity.
It was an audacious raid in an extremist stronghold of northwest Syria, months in the works and executed with the understanding that children might die as well as the hunted IS chief if the building’s occupants did not get out when given the chance to leave.
The apparent suicide bombing came before or early in a two-hour gun battle Thursday. First responders said 13 people died, six of them children. No U.S. commandos were wounded, military officials said.
President Joe Biden, who ordered the raid, said the world is rid of a man he described as the driving force behind the “genocide of the Yazidi people in northwestern Iraq in 2014,” when slaughters wiped out villages, thousands of women and young girls were sold into slavery and rape was used as a weapon of war.
Read more
© Copyright LaPresse