Pentagon willing to review Syrian raid after reports of civilian deaths; Biden says IS leader blew himself up – as it happened

The leader of Islamic State and one of the world’s most wanted men has been killed during an overnight raid in Syria by US special forces.

Here are the main developments:

• Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi died in the village of Atme, just 9 miles from where his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed during a similar US raid in October 2019.
• The pre-dawn attack on a house led to up to 13 fatalities, among them women and children.
• Without reference to the raid, Unicef confirmed at least six children were killed in Atme overnight.
• In a White House address, Joe Biden said Qurayshi blew himself up the third floor, killing his own family members.
• US officials said the raid was planned for months and lasted two hours.
• A White House official said that US forces “took a lot of information” from the compound that could “lead to other leads”.
• Department of Defense spokesman John Kirby said the Pentagon has “strong, strong indications” that civilian deaths in the raid were not caused by US forces.
• However, the Pentagon said it was willing to review the operation.

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CNN just released a dramatic and graphic footage from the scene of the raid, which includes disturbing videos of rescue workers removing bodies of deceased children and shots of blood stains all around the compound.

The segment, narrated by CNN correspondent Arwa Damon, includes images of a separate building with large bullet holes and a video taken at night with the sound of helicopters and gunfire in the background.

The Washington Post spoke to people who live in the town where al-Qurayshi’s raid took place. They reported hearing the thunderous sounds of helicopters before a shower of gunfire appeared to fall from the sky. Here’s more:

It was sleepless night across Syria’s northern Idlib province, with alarming sounds, deadly violence and a barrage of breathless rumors. Grainy cellphone videos were passed around depicting fragments of an event — muzzle flashes, shouted entreaties — whose contours emerged only later, after the sun rose Thursday on a partially demolished and bloodied cinder block home.

Mahmoud al-Sheikh, who works at an auto repair shop less than a mile from the house, had also been kept awake by the sounds. He said he heard a soldier giving orders over a loudspeaker: “Children and women, leave. We are entering the house,” someone said.

Sheikh said he did not know who lived in the house, in the Syrian town of Atma, but he said he often saw women and small children coming in and out.

There was nothing terribly extraordinary about the men in the house, he added, saying they did not outwardly match the description of hard-line Islamist fighters who often wore long beards.

Residents who lived close to the house told Omar Nezhat, a local journalist, that they were interrogated by the soldiers, who marked their foreheads with numbers and told them not to worry, because American forces were there to kill an ISIS leader.

At least a dozen people, including six children, were killed along with Qurayshi, according to local first responders. The Pentagon said that three members of his family were killed when Qurayshi detonated an explosive device on the top floor of the building, along with a child who was killed on the floor below in circumstances that remained unclear.

Brett McGurk, the White House’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, told CNN that the raid went “almost exactly according to plan”, citing the mechanical issue that led to the destruction of a US helicopter.

McGurk said that forces were able to recover information from the compound, which served as al-Qurayshi operational headquarters.

“No doubt. Our forces on the site took a lot of information from the compound, and that will be analyzed by our professionals and will surely lead to other leads,” he said.

Here’s the Guardian’s Martin Chulov and Julian Borger on some skepticism around potential civilian casualities that still remains after the administration’s press conference. The Pentagon has said it will review reports of civilian deaths from the raid:

A senior administration official said: “This is an operation that has been long in planning and from a tactical perspective, went precisely as expected.”

However, there was a significant discrepancy between the initial Pentagon report that eight children had been safely evacuated and two children were killed by the blast triggered by Qurayshi, and the accounts of first responders on the scene who say they found six children and four women dead.

“Some of the corpses in the area do not look like they died in an explosion. They look like they were hit by extremely heavy calibre gunfire,” Charles Lister, director of the Syria programme at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said. “And we do know, because I saw it in a video last night as it was happening, that at least one of the helicopters in the area fired its heavy machine guns at the building for over a minute straight.”

Pentagon spokesman Jack Kirby said that there were “strong, strong indications” that civilian deaths – those of Qurashi’s wife and their two children – were caused by the IS leader. But he said that the US would review the operation to determine whether American action resulted in any civilian deaths.

Al-Qurayshi was the one of the “key architects” behind the Islamic State slave trade of Yazidi women, according to nonprofit Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) in a statement about al-Qurayshi’s death.

“Hajji Abdullah (al-Qurayshi) had enormous power to persecute and punish IS’s enemies as far back as 2014. Not only was he one of the key architects of the Islamic State slave trade in Yazidi women and children, he personally enslaved and raped captive women,” said Nerma Jelacic, deputy director of CIJA, in a statement.

CIJA said that it has enough evidence to accuse al-Qurayshi of genocide, extermination, slavery, rape, gender-based persecution and “a host of other crimes”.

This is Lauren Aratani taking over for Nadeem Badshah.

Republicans are already criticizing Joe Biden for the raid, with James Inhofe, a Republican senator, saying in a statement that it “raises questions about the Biden administration’s counterterrorism strategy”.

Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, denounced Biden for the lack of “partnerships and presence” in Afghanistan. He also questioned what the US government would have done with al-Qurayshi should he have been captured.

“I have many questions about whether there were law enforcement elements in this operation, and what the administration intended to do with him, or what they’ll do with other dangerous terrorists that are captured in the battlefield,” Inhofe said in the statement.

U.S. house speaker Nancy Pelosi has praised Joe Biden for overseeing the military operation that resulted in the death of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.

Iraqi military spokesman Yahya Rasool said Iraqi intelligence provided accurate information that led to the whereabouts of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi, Reuters reports.

The leader of the militant group died when he blew himself and family members up during a U.S. military raid in Syria, U.S. president Joe Biden said.

3 Feb 202214.14 EST

Martin Chulov

Being an Islamic State leader is not what it used to be. The death of the latest IS supremo, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, far from the heartland of the terror group’s rise in Iraq in a frugal home in the back blocks of Syria, is another painful blow to an organisation that only five years ago held significant territory in both countries and cast a shadow across an entire region.