Inside Biden’s Decision To Hit ISIS’s Elusive Leader

The man who carries in his breast pocket the precise number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan — and who was criticized for decisions in Afghanistan that added 13 more to the tally — and whose late son’s military service remains a point of pride, was confronted with one of the weightiest decisions of his presidency.

A constant give-and-take among Biden and his military commanders — over whether, when and exactly how to go after the Islamic State leader — unfolded over several weeks. It all culminated Tuesday morning in the Oval Office, senior administration officials said.

Biden, meeting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, authorized his first major counterterrorism operation, a raid not dissimilar to one that he had opposed more than a decade earlier, one that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“He gave the final go” on the “incredibly complex, high-risk” endeavor, said an administration official, who like others in this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose sensitive details.

That authorization Tuesday, which came on a day when most of Washington was consumed with how Biden would fill a Supreme Court vacancy, was the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes work by U.S. intelligence and military personnel. After operatives located Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group, Biden was briefed in detail in December and presented with several options for capturing or killing him.

Biden and his advisers saw an opportunity to deal a major setback to the Islamic State, a militant terrorist group that some officials have worried is in the midst of a resurgence. The United States has carried out several operations in recent years in an attempt to track down and kill its leaders as a way of disrupting the group.

An affiliate of Islamic State, or ISIS, attacked the Kabul airport in August as the United States was evacuating, killing 13 U.S. service members. And just last month, the group attacked a prison in northeast Syria, though officials said that did not prompt the raid on Qurayshi.

U.S. officials hope that Qurayshi’s status as a longtime leader within the terrorist group would make his death a particular blow.

“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,’” said a senior administration official. “And so, this is a continued push that has been underway for quite some time to continue to remove the leadership elements of ISIS.”

This operation was unusually complex, U.S. officials said, because of the number of children in the area. Families lived on the first floor of the complex, apparently unaware that they shared a building with a leading terrorist. Qurayshi rarely came out of the house, aside from going onto the roof to pray, instead relying on couriers to convey his orders to ISIS fighters.

In December, commanders briefed Biden on exactly how the operation could go, even bringing in a tabletop model of Qurayshi’s compound to emphasize the mission’s complexity. At that point, Biden became steeped in the operational details, officials said.

Biden saw Qurayshi’s location as a deliberate choice, surrounding himself with women and children to make it harder for the United States to take him down without significant civilian casualties. That led Biden to reshape the mission, directing that it would be carried out by U.S. forces on the ground rather than an airstrike, putting American lives at greater risk.

“We made a choice to pursue a special forces raid at a much greater risk than our — to our own people,” Biden said Thursday morning. “Rather than targeting him with an airstrike, we made this choice to minimize civilian casualties.”

© -/AFP/Getty Images This image released by the US Department of Defense shows the compound that had housed ISIS emir al-Qurayshi in northwest Syria.Adding to the operation’s risky nature was the fact that the area is largely controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a militant group with ties to al-Qaeda.

Some of Biden’s comments suggested he was cognizant of the criticism that accompanied the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which detractors said put civilians at risk and exposed women and girls to harm. On Thursday, the president was at pains to emphasize the lengths he’d gone to avoid civilian casualties, and he stressed Qurayshi’s role in the assault on the Yazidi people in Iraq, including “thousands of women and young girls sold into slavery.”

The debates unfolding inside the Situation Room over the past several months were not entirely different from those that occurred in 2011, when Obama’s top advisers deliberated whether to send a Navy SEAL team into Pakistan to go after bin Laden.

Biden was among the skeptical voices. At the time, he said more needed to be done to confirm that the al-Qaeda leader was actually in the compound in Pakistan, and he worried about the risk to American troops. He voiced his dissent internally, according to numerous accounts, although he later claimed that he told Obama privately, “Follow your instincts.” Obama authorized the raid, whose success became one of the landmark events of his presidency.

“Biden’s primary concern was the political consequences of failure,” Robert Gates, Obama’s defense secretary, who was also initially skeptical, later wrote in his book “Duty.”

The consequences of potential failure this time were also significant. Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan resulted in turbulence and death, resulting in a turning point in the first year of his presidency from which he still has not fully recovered. In the midst of a chaotic withdrawal, the military authorized a drone strike that killed 10 civilians, a result that U.S. officials said was a “horrible mistake.”

Another blunder involving the military would compound Biden’s problems. But still, he seemed to approach this raid differently than he did the raid to capture bin Laden.

“In many ways it’s the difference between being president and being vice president,” said Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and defense secretary under Obama. “The vice president can give thoughts and views. But in this situation, he’s the president. He’s got to make the final decision.”

Biden realized that the operation would affect history’s judgment of his presidency, Panetta added.

“In the end, I think the president understands that in many ways his legacy as president is determined by these kinds of decisions,” he said. “He could make the wrong call and it could turn out to be a disaster. But ultimately he’s got to decide. … If you make the right decision and it works out, you get a hell of a lot of credit for having the courage of making the right decision.”

Biden gave the final authorization for the raid Tuesday morning in a meeting in the Oval Office, according to administration officials, and military leaders determined Wednesday that they had the right conditions for the raid. They tend to aim for a night where the moon is dim.

“A lot of factors had to line up to be just right,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. “This was the best window to execute the mission.”

Biden and his top advisers gathered in the Situation Room to monitor the operation unfold in real time. Biden sat at the head table with no suit jacket around his shoulders and a black mask on his face. Vice President Harris sat to his right. Both looked straight ahead.

Special Operations forces, who went through dozens of rehearsals of the raid, were set to be on the ground for about two hours. Thousands of miles away, Biden and his top advisers watched as the troops landed and were able to remove some of the children and families from the first floor.

“It was real-time monitoring,” said one official, adding that there was “obviously tremendous tension, just given the number of children we knew were in the house, on the first floor.”

Upon arrival, the troops used a bullhorn and shouted out their presence. There was relief in the tension-filled Situation Room when families in Syria agreed to leave the site and were led to safety. All told, according to U.S. officials, they were able to evacuate 10 people, eight of them children.

But moments later, there was a massive explosion. Qurayshi, U.S. officials said, had detonated a bomb on the third floor, killing himself and his family. It was something that U.S. officials had thought was possible, particularly since Qurayshi’s predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also detonated a bomb during a raid that killed him in 2019.

The military even had its engineers assess whether such an explosion would bring down the whole building, concluding — correctly — that it would only destroy the top floor. “I doubt he knew that,” an official said of Qurayshi. “It was probably his intent to kill everybody in that building.”

Biden and his team continued watching as one of the military’s helicopters encountered mechanical problems. The operatives eventually destroyed the helicopter, but took no casualties.

Throughout Wednesday night, Biden received updates from Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, on other aspects of the mission. And Thursday morning, he delivered remarks from the White House, hailing the work of the military and telling foes of the United States, “We remain vigilant. We remain prepared. … We will come after you and find you.”

But Wednesday night, just after the Special Operations team left the ground in Syria and the tense Situation Room began to relax, Biden rose to leave, ending with the same remark he uses to conclude most of his speeches: “God bless our troops.”

Dan Lamothe and Tyler Pager contributed to this report.