For a man given to fiery rhetoric and long-winded sermons, Abu
Muhammad al-Adnani became oddly quiet during his last summer as the
chief spokesman for the Islamic State.
The Syrian who exhorted
thousands of young Muslims to don suicide belts appeared increasingly
obsessed with his own safety, U.S. officials say. He banished
cellphones, shunned large meetings and avoided going outdoors in the
daytime. He began sleeping in crowded tenements in a northern Syrian
town called al-Bab, betting on the presence of young children to shield
him from the drones prowling the skies overhead.
But in late
August, when a string of military defeats suffered by the Islamic State
compelled Adnani to briefly leave his hiding place, the Americans were
waiting for him. A joint surveillance operation by the CIA and the
Pentagon tracked the 39-year-old as he left his al-Bab sanctuary and
climbed into a car with a companion. They were headed north on a rural
highway a few miles from town when a Hellfire missile struck the
vehicle, killing both of them.
The Aug. 30 missile strike was the
culmination of a months-long mission targeting one of the Islamic
State’s most prominent — and, U.S. officials say, most dangerous —
senior leaders. The Obama administration has said little publicly about
the strike, other than to rebut Russia’s claims that one of its own
warplanes dropped the bomb that ended Adnani’s life.
But while
key operational details of the Adnani strike remain secret, U.S.
officials are speaking more openly about what they describe as an
increasingly successful campaign to track and kill the Islamic State’s
senior commanders, including Adnani, the No. 2 leader and the biggest
prize so far. At least six high-level Islamic State officials have died
in U.S. airstrikes in the past four months, along with dozens of
deputies and brigadiers, all but erasing entire branches of the group’s
leadership chart.
Their deaths have left the group’s chieftain, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
increasingly isolated, deprived of his most capable lieutenants and
limited in his ability to communicate with his embattled followers, U.S.
officials say. Baghdadi has not made a public appearance in more than
two years and released only a single audiotape — suggesting that the
Islamic State’s figurehead is now in “deep, deep hiding,” said Brett
McGurk, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the global coalition
seeking to destroy Baghdadi’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
“He
is in deep hiding because we have eliminated nearly all of his
deputies,” McGurk said at a meeting of coalition partners in Berlin this
month. “We had their network mapped. If you look at all of his deputies
and who he was relying on, they’re all gone.”
The loss of senior
leaders does not mean that the Islamic State is about to collapse. U.S.
officials and terrorism experts caution that the group’s decentralized
structure and sprawling network of regional affiliates ensure that it
would survive even the loss of Baghdadi himself. But they say the deaths
point to the growing sophistication of a targeted killing campaign
built by the CIA and the Defense Department over the past two years for
the purpose of flushing out individual leaders who are working hard to
stay hidden.
The
effort is being aided, U.S. officials say, by new technology as well as
new allies, including deserters and defectors who are shedding light on
how the terrorists travel and communicate. At the same time,
territorial losses and military defeats are forcing the group’s
remaining leaders to take greater risks, traveling by car and
communicating by cellphones and computers instead of couriers, the
officials and analysts said.
“The bad guys have to communicate
electronically because they have lost control of the roads,” said a
veteran U.S. counterterrorism official who works closely with U.S. and
Middle Eastern forces and who, like others interviewed for this article,
spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operations.
“Meanwhile our penetration is better because ISIS’s situation is getting
more desperate and they are no longer vetting recruits,” the official
said, using a common acronym for the terrorist group.
This
image made from video posted on a militant website on July 5, 2014,
shows the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, delivering a
sermon at a mosque in Iraq during his first public appearance. (AP)
“We have a better picture inside ISIS now,” he said, “than we ever did against al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
The caliphate’s cheerleader
The
first to go was “Abu Omar the Chechen.” The red-bearded Georgian
Islamic militant, commonly known as Omar al-Shishani, fought in the
Russia-Georgia war in 2008 and had been trained by U.S. Special Forces
when he was in the Georgian military. He rose to become the Islamic
State’s “minister of war” and was reported to have been killed on at
least a half-dozen occasions since 2014, only to surface, apparently
unharmed, to lead military campaigns in Iraq and Syria.
Shishani’s
luck ran out on July 10 when a U.S. missile struck a gathering of
militant leaders near the Iraqi city of Mosul. It was the beginning of a
string of successful operations targeting key leaders of the Islamic
State’s military, propaganda and “external operations” divisions, U.S.
officials said in interviews.
On Sept. 6, a coalition airstrike killed Wa’il Adil Hasan Salman
al-Fayad, the Islamic State’s “minister of information,” near Raqqa,
Syria. On Sept. 30, a U.S. attack killed deputy military commander Abu
Jannat, the top officer in charge of Mosul’s defenses and one of 13
senior Islamic State officials in Mosul who were killed in advance of
the U.S.-assisted offensive to retake the city. On Nov. 12, a
U.S. missile targeted Abd al-Basit al-Iraqi, an Iraqi national described
as the leader of the Islamic State’s Middle Eastern external-operations
network, responsible for carrying out attacks against Western targets.
But
it was Adnani’s death that delivered the single biggest blow, U.S.
analysts say. The Syrian-born Islamist militant was regarded by experts
as more than a mere spokesman. A longtime member of the Islamic State’s
inner circle, he was a gifted propagandist and strategic thinker who
played a role in many of the organization’s greatest successes, from its
commandeering of social media to its most spectacular terrorist attacks
overseas, including in Paris and Brussels.
His importance within the organization was also steadily rising. Last
year, after the U.S.-led coalition began retaking cities across Iraq and
Syria, it was Adnani who stepped into the role of cheerleader in chief,
posting messages and sermons to boost morale while calling on
sympathetic Muslims around the world to carry out terrorist attacks
using any means available.
“He was the voice of the caliphate
when its caliph was largely silent,” said Will McCants, an expert on
militant extremism at the Brookings Institution and author of “
The ISIS Apocalypse,” a 2015 book on the Islamic State. “He was the one who called for a war on the West.”
The
CIA and the Pentagon declined to comment on their specific roles in the
Adnani operation. But other officials familiar with the effort said the
task of finding the Islamic State’s No. 2 leader became a priority
nearly on par with the search for Baghdadi. But like his boss, Adnani, a
survivor of earlier wars between U.S. forces and Sunni insurgents in
Iraq, proved to be remarkably skilled at keeping himself out of the path
of U.S. missiles.
"His personal security was particularly good,” said the U.S.
counterterrorism official involved in coordinating U.S. and Middle
Eastern military efforts. “And as time went on, it got even better.”
But
the quality of the intelligence coming from the region was improving as
well. A U.S. official familiar with the campaign described a two-stage
learning process: In the early months, the bombing campaign focused on
the most visible targets, such as weapons depots and oil refineries. But
by the middle of last year, analysts were sorting through torrents of
data on the movements of individual leaders.
The information came
from a growing network of human informants as well as from
technological innovations, including improved surveillance drones and
special manned aircraft equipped with the Pentagon’s Enhanced Medium
Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System, or EMARSS, designed to
identify and track individual targets on the ground.
“In the
first year, the strikes were mostly against structures,” said a U.S.
official familiar with the air campaign. “In the last year, they became
much more targeted, leading to more successes.”
Watching and waiting
And yet, insights
into the whereabouts of the top two leaders — Baghdadi and Adnani —
remained sparse. After the Obama administration put a $5 million bounty
on him, Adnani became increasingly cautious, U.S. officials say,
avoiding not only cellphones but also buildings with satellite dishes.
He used couriers to pass messages and stayed away from large gatherings.
Eventually,
his role shifted to coordinating the defense of a string of towns and
villages near the Turkish border. One of these was Manbij, a Syrian hub
and transit point for Islamic State fighters traveling to and from
Turkey. Another was Dabiq, a small burg mentioned in Islam’s prophetic
texts as the future site of the end-times battle between the forces of
good and evil.
Adnani picked for his headquarters the small town
of al-Bab, about 30 miles northeast of Aleppo. There he hid in plain
sight amid ordinary Syrians, conducting meetings in the same crowded
apartment buildings where he slept. As was his custom, he used couriers
to deliver messages — until suddenly it became nearly impossible to do
so.
On Aug. 12, a U.S.-backed army of Syrian rebels captured Manbij in the
first of a series of crushing defeats for the Islamic State along the
Turkish frontier. Thousands of troops began massing for assaults on the
key border town of Jarabulus, as well as Dabiq, just over 20 miles from
Adnani’s base.
With many roads blocked by hostile forces, communication with
front-line fighters became difficult. Adnani was compelled to venture
from his sanctuary for meetings, and when he did so on Aug. 30, the
CIA’s trackers finally had the clear shot they had been waiting for
weeks to take.
Records generated by commercially available
aircraft-tracking radar show a small plane flying multiple loops that
day over a country road just northwest of al-Bab. The plane gave no call
sign, generally an indication that it is a military aircraft on a
clandestine mission. The profile and flight pattern were similar to ones
generated in the past for the Pentagon’s EMARSS-equipped MC-12 prop
planes, used for surveillance of targets on the ground.
The
country road is the same one on which Adnani was traveling when a
Hellfire missile hit his car, killing him and his companion.
The
death was announced the same day by the Islamic State, in a bulletin
mourning the loss of a leader who was “martyred while surveying the
operations to repel the military campaigns against Aleppo.” But in
Washington, the impact of his death was muted by a two-week delay as
U.S. officials sought proof that it was indeed Adnani’s body that was
pulled from the wreckage of the car.
The confirmation finally
came Sept. 12 in a Pentagon statement asserting that a “U.S. precision
airstrike” targeting Adnani had eliminated the terrorist group’s “chief
propagandist, recruiter and architect of external terrorist operations.”
The
Russian claims have persisted, exasperating the American analysts who
know how long and difficult the search had been. Meanwhile, the ultimate
impact of Adnani’s death is still being assessed.
Longtime
terrorism experts argue that a diffuse, highly decentralized terrorist
network such as the Islamic State tends to bounce back quickly from the
loss of a leader, even one as prominent as Adnani. “Decapitation is one
arm of a greater strategy, but it cannot defeat a terrorist group by
itself,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of Georgetown University’s Center
for Security Studies and an author of multiple books on terrorism.
Noting that the Islamic State’s military prowess derives from the “more
anonymous Saddamist military officers” who make up the group’s
professional core, Hoffman said the loss of a chief propagandist was
likely to be “only a temporary derailment.”
Yet, as still more
missiles find their targets, the Islamic State is inevitably losing its
ability to command and inspire its embattled forces, other terrorism
experts said. “The steady destruction of the leadership of the Islamic
State, plus the loss of territory, is eroding the group’s appeal and
potency,” said Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran and a terrorism
expert at the Brookings Institution. “The Islamic State is facing a
serious crisis.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/isiss-second-in-command-hid-in-syria-for-months-the-day-he-stepped-out-the-us-was-waiting/2016/11/28/64a32efe-b253-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html
