Biden's "bin Laden" moment

Like the previous two most wanted terrorist leaders on America’s list – his predecessor as Isis chief and the founder of al-Qaeda - Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi had spent every hour of every day and night hiding from the eyes and ears of the US intelligence services. As soon as he had been officially named in 2019 to succeed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who took his own life when trapped by US special forces, a bounty of $10 million was placed on his head and every component of the US counter-terrorism apparatus, backed by the ever-watchful and listening satellites of the National Security Agency (NSA), were focused on hunting him down. The three most prominent successes of the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in tracking America’s most dangerous terrorist adversaries over the last decade have followed similar patterns. It took a dedicated team of CIA counter-terrorist specialists ten years to find Osama bin Laden in a compound outside the town of Abbottabad in Pakistan, and just a few hours for a JSOC unit of around two dozen members of Seal Team Six to assault his hideout and shoot him dead. In the case of al-Qurayshi, the hunting had taken 28 months but about four weeks ago the intelligence on his whereabouts was so strong that President Biden was informed of the breakthrough and his approval sought for a special operations attack to be carried out. The same type of military options were presented to the White House in all three of the counter-terrorist operations.The intelligence on bin Laden’s hideaway was good but not fullproof. There was some doubt, although not in the mind of the CIA trackers, that the tall man seen walking inside the compound with his head down was the leader of al-Qaeda. In April 2011 President Obama was given the option of a bombing raid to destroy the compound and everyone in it. But he chose the option of a ground strike force, not just in the hope of preventing casualties among bin Laden’s family living with him but also to provide the proof he knew the world would be waiting for, that the tall man really was the al-Qaeda leader. It was the highest-risk option and nearly proved disastrous when one of the assault team’s helicopters crashed on site. But the mission succeeded and Obama was able to make his historic announcement from the White House in May 2011. The special operations option was selected for both al-Bahgdadi and al-Qurayshi for the same reasons. To prove that JSOC had got their man, DNA samples were needed in each case. Too often al-Baghdadi, for example, had “died” but then appeared again. Al-Baghdadi, the founding leader of Isis, was cornered by special operations troops at his isolated hideout in October 2019 in Syria’s Idlib province. He detonated a suicide vest in a tunnel beneath the building when the commandos approached. Al-Qurayshi made the same decision but blew up his family with him.