President Joe Biden said Thursday a global "terrorist threat" was removed when the head of the Islamic State group blew himself up after US special forces swooped on his Syrian hideout in an "incredibly challenging" nighttime helicopter raid. Biden said he ordered an assault by troops, rather than merely bombing the house where the IS leader was located, in order to minimize civilian casualties, even though this meant " much greater risk to our own people."
"The United States military forces successfully removed a major terrorist threat to the world, the global leader of ISIS," Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, Biden said in nationally televised remarks.
The operation dealt the biggest setback to the jihadist IS organization since Qurashi's predecessor, the better-known Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a US commando raid in the same Syrian region of Idlib in 2019.
The house contained "families, including children" and "as our troops approached to capture the terrorist, in a final act of desperate cowardice, with no regard to the lives of his own family or others in the building, he chose to blow himself up," Biden said.
Qurashi did not merely set off a suicide vest to kill himself, but detonated the entire "third floor" of the residence in the town of Atme, Biden said, "taking several members of his family with him."
