After mostly avoiding getting dragged into the partisan fights between President Donald Trump and his opponents, the U.S. military faced an uncomfortable reality this month: There’s no easy escape from Washington’s battles.
Thousands of troops were moved to the U.S.-Mexico border just before the midterm election as Trump warned of a looming “invasion,” even as his critics cautioned that the decision was a campaign ploy. And just as it was reported on Monday that some of those soldiers may be ordered back from the border in the coming days ahead of most migrants’ arrival there, Trump escalated a separate spat that may further infuriate advocates of a politically independent military.
Over the weekend, the commander in chief took aim at retired Adm. William H. McRaven — one of the military’s most revered Navy SEAL and Special Operations commanders who oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden and the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Deriding him as an “Obama backer,” Trump told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”: “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that, wouldn’t it have been nice?”
Undeterred by the criticism that ensued after his verbal attack, Trump doubled down in several tweets on Monday in which he lashed out at Pakistan, where bin Laden hid for years. “Of course we should have captured Osama bin Laden long before we did,” Trump wrote.
Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. military operation in 2011, a couple of years before another man was getting ready to claim his role as the world’s most feared terror group leader: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-declared caliph of the so-called Islamic State. Baghdadi’s death has been reported multiple times since the Islamic State’s territorial retreat sped up in 2016, but audio recordings suggest that he’s likely still alive.
Amid Trump’s attacks on his predecessors and U.S. military leaders over bin Laden, there’s one question Trump has so far not publicly asked since assuming office: where’s Baghdadi, and why hasn’t he been captured yet?
Some of the most recent intelligence by U.S.-allied partners in the region suggests that any answer would involve the painstaking and yearslong work that’s almost always needed to track down top militant commanders like bin Laden or Baghdadi.
A senior commander with Iraq’s elite U.S.-trained Counter Terrorism Service, the nation’s most effective fighting group against the Islamic State, said in an interview with The Washington Post last week that Baghdadi is likely suffering from physical injuries sustained over the last four years and is limited in his movements. The commander said Iraq’s latest intelligence indicates the militant leader is moving between the sparsely populated desert regions that straddle Syria and Iraq’s borders.
Despite losing the territory it controlled in Iraq by December 2017, Islamic State still maintains pockets of influence along the lengthy border with Syria and in villages inside Iraq’s Sunni heartland. The group has recently mounted low-level terrorist attacks in places it has long been evicted from like Mosul, Ramadi and Tikrit.
Both bin Laden and Baghdadi have succeeded at erasing most of their traces. While bin Laden was involved in the day-to-day operations of his al-Qaida group before the 9/11 attacks, the subsequent U.S. focus on capturing or killing him led to him becoming a more subdued and symbolic figure. Keeping a low profile, bin Laden worked on a broad strategy for the group. Baghdadi has kept an even lower profile, with only one public appearance even before a U.S.-led coalition intervened in Syria and Iraq.
The intervention — which has mostly consisted of airstrikes and some U.S. ground forces operations inside Syria and Iraq — was launched under then-President Barack Obama and continued by Trump, who publicly pondered withdrawing ground troops but has so far not followed through at the urging of top military commanders. Celebrated as a military success in the United States, human rights organizations have cautioned that the U.S.-led operation “took a horrendous toll on civilians.” While it helped local forces to win back about 95 percent of territory previously held by the Islamic States, some of the group’s top leaders still remain at large.
With the Islamic State turning into a more guerilla-style terror group, tracking them down might not become easier, as American and allied Syrian and Iraqi forces have been slow to transition from combat to the more intensive intelligence operations needed to target the clandestine Islamic State remnants.
