The Morning Dispatch: ISIS Leader Dead, U.S. Says

Happy Friday! If you’ve had a rough week, take solace in the fact that you didn’t have to try explaining to your spouse why your net worth plunged $30 billion yesterday.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Joe Biden announced yesterday the counterterrorism mission conducted in Syria Wednesday night was successful in killing Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the top leader of ISIS. U.S. Special Operations opted for a special forces raid rather than an air strike to limit civilian casualties, but Biden claimed al-Qurayshi blew himself up, killing several members of his own family.

• The New York Times reported Thursday that U.S. intelligence officials claim to have uncovered a Russian plan to use faked video footage to create a pretext for invading Ukraine. The officials did not provide the Times any evidence of the plan, but said they hope to spoil it by publicizing it.

• Officials from the United Arab Emirates announced that its military intercepted three more drones entering its airspace on Wednesday, days after it intercepted a ballistic missile launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

• The Bank of England announced Thursday its Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to begin reducing the stock of bond purchases, and voted 5-4 to raise interest rates another 0.25 percentage points to 0.5 percent. The four voters in the minority wanted to raise interest rates 0.5 percentage points to 0.75 percent.

• The Labor Department reported Thursday that initial jobless claims decreased by 23,000 week-over-week to 238,000 last week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release employment data for January later this morning, and economists generally expect the Omicron wave to have slowed hiring dramatically.

• Omicron continues to wane in the United States, with the average number of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases falling 49 percent over the past two weeks. But daily COVID-19 deaths—which have been a lagging statistical indicator throughout the pandemic—have increased about 13 percent over the same time period.

• Hundreds of thousands of U.S. homes were without power and thousands of flights were canceled on Thursday as winter storms swept through much of the South and Midwest.

U.S. Announces ISIS Leader Dead

Late Wednesday night, as we were putting the finishing touches on yesterday’s TMD, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby issued a cryptic statement: “U.S. Special Operations forces under the control of U.S. Central Command conducted a counterterrorism mission this evening in northwest Syria. The mission was successful. There were no U.S. casualties.”

Kirby did not elaborate any further, but wire services began reporting on a raid targeting a house in the town of Atmeh near Syria’s border with Turkey. Just before 8 a.m. ET, President Joe Biden disclosed the target. “Thanks to the skill and bravery of our Armed Forces, we have taken off the battlefield Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi—the leader of ISIS,” he said. “All Americans have returned safely from the operation.”

Al-Qurayshi—born in Iraq as Amir Muhammad Said Abdel-Rahman al-Mawla and also known as Hajji Abdullah—joined Al-Qaeda nearly two decades ago, and pledged his loyalty to the Islamic State in 2014. In the intervening years, he spent time in detention at the United States’ Camp Bucca facility in Iraq, where agreed to inform on his fellow jihadists. 

“He was a snitch. He ratted out some of his rivals within Al-Qaeda,” Bill Roggio, an Army veteran and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Dispatch. 

Nevertheless, al-Qurayshi climbed the ranks of Islamic State leadership and was chosen to succeed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as caliph when al-Baghdadi died in an October 2019 raid similar to the one U.S. Special Operations carried out this week.

“Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said in late-morning remarks yesterday. The administration opted for a special forces raid rather than an airstrike to minimize civilian casualties, Biden noted. Just last week—after several fatal, high-profile screw-ups were exposed—Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the Pentagon to come up with an “action plan” to limit such collateral damage. A number of innocent noncombatants—the Pentagon says three, Syrian aid workers say 13—died anyways.

“As our troops approached to capture the terrorist, in a final act of desperate cowardice, with no regard to the lives of his own family or others in the building, he chose to blow himself up—not just with a vest, but to blow up that third floor,” Biden said of al-Qurayshi. “Rather than face justice for the crimes he has committed, [he took] several members of his family with him, just as his predecessor did.” But before the detonation, according to Kirby, U.S. forces were able to evacuate 10 civilians from the first and second floor of the building where al-Qurayshi was hiding out. Two al-Qurayshi lieutenants engaged U.S. forces on the second floor and were subsequently killed.

The intelligence gathering that led to the raid began months ago, a senior administration official told reporters, and the president was first briefed in depth on the possibility of a raid by the relevant operational commanders in mid-December. Biden officially approved the mission—similar in scope to the Osama bin Laden raid he opposed as vice president—on Tuesday morning.

Roggio argued al-Qurayshi, believed to be in his mid-40s, deserved to be killed for a whole host of reasons—he was a key figure in ISIS’s 2014 genocide of the Yazidi people in Iraq and had overseen the militant group’s terrorist operations around the world. But the United States’ decision to target him—the State Department was offering a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture—was about more than vengeance. 

“Hajji Abdullah being removed is going to be a blow to ISIS because even while Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the Emir, Hajji Abdullah was heavily involved in running many of the operations, including many of the external operations,” the Biden administration official said. “We anticipate that this is going to lead to disruption within ISIS. He’s really one of the few remaining, shall we call them, ‘legacy leaders.’”

That’s likely to be true in the short-term. ISIS will need to choose al-Qurayshi’s successor, address new security concerns, and otherwise rebuild. “But the organization isn’t going to collapse with the death of one leader, it’s going to carry on,” Roggio said. “These jihadist organizations, they have a plan for succession. They have to deal with this stuff.”

The Islamic State today—having been driven out of Mosul, Raqqa, and just about everywhere else—is a shell of what it was seven or eight years ago. But it’s far from stamped out. On January 21, ISIS fighters laid siege to a prison in Syria holding thousands of their fellow combatants, resulting in hundreds of ISIS and Kurdish deaths and requiring some of the 900 or so U.S. troops stationed in Syria to intervene. In early December, the militant group reportedly killed seven Kurdish security force members and three civilians in a small Iraqi town in early December.

Al-Qurayshi’s death will likely put a damper on the group’s recent momentum—particularly its recruiting efforts—but a new leader could have things back up and running in short order, just as al-Qurayshi was able to do following al-Baghdadi’s early demise. “It is a game of whack-a-mole, and we don’t whack the moles fast enough for it to make a difference,” Roggio said. “We kill a leader here, we kill a leader there; six months in between, eight months. We don’t kill ISIS leaders fast enough and in big enough numbers to create a leadership void in the group that causes it to collapse.”

Russia’s Pre-War Propaganda Push

It’s become increasingly clear in recent weeks that, if Russian President Vladimir Putin ultimately decides to reinvade Ukraine, he’s going to claim—both for a domestic audience and on the international stage—that something forced his hand. In a piece for the site today, Charlotte explores the Russian propaganda that is laying the groundwork for such a move.

Putin has orchestrated a months-long propaganda blitz to re-cast NATO allies as aggressors and Ukraine as their hapless vehicle for war.

Late last month, a spokesman for a Russian-backed separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine—the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR)—warned Russian media that British-trained commandos were planning a “series of terrorist attacks” on critical infrastructure in the Donbass region. The operation’s goal: to “lure” Moscow into an unwanted armed conflict with the West, the spokesman alleged.

Look no further than the comments responding to the accusation’s coverage in RT, Russia’s state-controlled news agency, to grasp its intended effect. 

“The U.S. conducted several false flag operations at home, for example, 9/11,” one commenter wrote. “I would not be surprised if they do something similar in Ukraine.”

“Kievnazis are asking for a bloody nose,” wrote another.

“Please Russia do not allow this fascist genocide against your people to take place!” exclaimed one commenter. “Kick out the EU/US zionist invaders AND their servants, the traitors of humanity!”

The Kremlin’s unremitting propaganda “exposing” U.S. and UK-led efforts to spark a war could lend an eventual false flag operation credence in the eyes of the Russian public.

On Tuesday, a Moscow-based outlet published the testimony of a separatist veteran who alleged Kyiv planned to create a “pretext for war” in the Donbass between February 4 and February 21. “Russia will not be able to stay away from the conflict in this case,” he said. In a report circulated by Russian media Wednesday, a separatist politician claimed that the United States had armed Ukrainian forces with chemical weapons and intended to blame the Russian-backed militias for their deployment. And Thursday, a DPR spokesman alleged that Kyiv told foreign embassies to evacuate their citizens from the Donbass in anticipation of a Ukrainian offensive in the region.

There’s not a huge appetite for war among the Russian people. Current narratives in Russian media present Putin as peacekeeper, claiming that he would only act if acted upon.

Russian officials continue to deny harboring plans to invade Ukraine in their public appearances, dismissing allegations of “imminent” military action as products of U.S.-led disinformation. “We consider unacceptable even the idea of ​​a war between our peoples,” said Russian foreign ministry official Alexei Zaitsev, claiming that the notion was fabricated by “overseas curators,” despite Russia’s military buildup on the Ukrainian border. 

Given Russia’s highly regulated information environment—in which government officials increasingly exert control over the press, think tanks, and academics—these statements seem to resonate with Russian news consumers. Comments sections on the country’s primary media outlets brim with anger toward Western efforts to start a war at the expense of the Ukrainian people. 

Recent troop deployments to Eastern Europe by individual NATO member states, including the U.S., shore up this skewed depiction of the unfolding crisis. On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced the movement of 3,000 U.S. troops to the NATO countries of Poland, Germany, and Romania—a move it described as precautionary and temporary. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko denounced the additional deployments as a “destructive step” that would “increase military tension and reduce the margin for political solutions.” 

“The main message is that they don’t want to go to war, they will not go to war unless they are provoked by the United States, mainly, and Ukraine as their ally. Then they will need to defend themselves, especially to defend Russian citizens,” said Iliya Kusa, an analyst at Ukraine Institute for the Future, explaining that more than 700,000 people have been issued Russian passports in separatist-occupied territory. “So it’s not about ‘Russian-speaking’ people anymore, as it was in 2014, but about Russian citizens.”

Worth Your Time

• For more on al-Qurayshi and ISIS, check out Colin Clarke’s latest piece for Politico. “Replacing Qurayshi is likely to be a challenge for ISIS, particularly if the next leader is not someone with a reputation on par with previous jihadi stalwarts, like Baghdadi and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Clarke writes. “Whoever comes next may lack the religious or military credentials of his predecessors, leaving the group struggling to recruit. Succession presents terrorist groups with difficult decisions. High-profile, charismatic leaders can be effective recruiters, but they also present attractive counterterrorism targets. Leadership transitions also create the risk of rifts between top commanders, opening longstanding tensions between factions competing internally.”

• Ross Douthat’s latest column pushes back on Obama White House alum Ben Rhodes’ assertion that the Republican Party, as a whole, “no longer accepts” democracy. “Donald Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image,” he writes. “Seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trump’s deceptions isn’t just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival can’t defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already—one that would hold up, no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.”

• In National Review, Kevin Williamson wonders if the era of big-tent political parties is over. “‘Are Democrats the Party of Joe Manchin, or AOC?’ asks [a recent headline]. And that, of course, is the real question,” Williamson writes. “In a more normal political time, the Democratic Party would be happy to represent such a wide swath of political opinion that both left-wing New Yorkers and Appalachian moderates felt at home there. But these are not normal times, and our political factions define themselves not by what they believe but by what—whom—they exclude. Implicit in the “Manchin or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” formulation is that the Democrats are going to be one or the other, even if, at the moment, they are both. There is a similar and more urgent question in front of Republicans, of course: Are they going to be the Trumpist party or something else?”

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Toeing the Company Line

• On the site today, Sarah has a piece exploring the odd legal limbo of the Equal Rights Amendment, which at one time or another has been ratified by 38 states but hasn’t been recognized as an amendment to the Constitution for various procedural reasons.

• On today’s episode of Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah dive into all aspects of Brian Flores’ discrimination complaint against the NFL and three teams, before turning to a dreaded Madison Cawthorn discussion and slightly less-dreaded Whoopi Goldberg discussion.

• Punxsutawney Phil forecast six more weeks of winter earlier this week, but that doesn’t bother Chris too much. “Things are pretty chilly out there and there’s no signs of daffodils popping up all over,” he writes in Thursday’s Stirewaltisms. “But that’s okay with me, because these are mostly normal problems of the kind America has been dealing with for decades.”

• Historian Hal Brands joined The Remnant on Thursday for a conversation with Jonah about the new era of great-power competition between China and Russia and the United States. What can America’s victory over the Soviet Union teach us about how it should prosecute today’s global conflicts? Should Joe Biden pursue a modern version of Harry Truman’s containment strategy? And was China’s authoritarian turn inevitable?

Let Us Know

On this day in 1789, the United States’ Electoral College met for the first time to unanimously elect George Washington the first president of the United States. 

What would have to happen for a presidential candidate to win all 538 electoral votes today? If you were trying to build such a candidate in a lab, what would you do?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).