BALADI NEWS
It was midnight on a quiet Saturday night when the residents of Barisha village in northwest Syria were jolted awake by the deafening trill of helicopters overhead, and the drumbeat of heavy machine gunfire.
The Independent had learnt from many residents that they had no idea a major US operation was underway against one of the most wanted and feared men in the world.
The area, a 15-minute drive to the Turkish border, is home to locals and people displaced from other parts of the country. Unusually for Syria, it is often quiet.
“It was incredibly loud and started around midnight. The gunfire from the choppers was intense. It woke the residents up and terrified them,” said Ahmed, a Syrian journalist who lives in the area and later went to the site of the raid. He asked for his name to be withheld.
“It was night and dark. We heard the bullets and didn’t want to leave our houses not knowing what was going on.
He told The Independent only one family saw what happened close up as they lived in a tent next door to the building where Baghdadi was hiding.
“They said foreign soldiers with machine guns stormed in and took them away. People they had never seen before. The soldiers told the residents in Arabic to leave but kept some of them sitting underneath an olive tree until they completed the operation.”
Ahmed added: “When they left, after taking prisoners and killing the rest, a plane came and struck the house to completely destroy it.”
In a different part of the countryside, another resident said that the exchange of fire went on until 3am.
“After that the site was targeted by five airstrikes by fighter jets followed by four more strikes. They were absolutely huge and lit up the sky,” Mohamed, another local reporter, said.
Another person said he saw at least three helicopters leaving with what he was told were bodies and captives.
“The house was completely taken out,” Abu Ahmed added.
The US President Donald Trump confirmed that nine people in total including two women, believed to be Baghdadi’s wives, were also killed, and 11 children were rescued.
Three other children were killed as Baghdadi had apparently dragged them with him into the tunnel when he killed himself.
Eight military helicopters flew for more than an hour over territory controlled by Russian and Syrian forces and landed under gunfire, Trump confirmed.
The US forces spent around two hours in the compound and took away ”sensitive information” relating to Isis, he said.
At the destroyed compound journalist Ahmed said the building was completely flattened and in one area there was a two-metre deep crater from the airstrikes.
Terrified residents told him US soldiers, who landed in helicopters, ordered civilians to leave or stay back and handed over several children they found in the area to a local shepherd for safekeeping.
“I counted seven bodies in body bags, one of which was a smaller body bag for a child and two were women,” Ahmed said, after visiting the site on Sunday morning.
“Some bodies were pulled out from under the rubble. Some bodies were burned. I saw one body cut in pieces like it had been blown up,” he added.
Local residents said the building was owned by a man known as Abu Mohamed al-Halabi.
Idlib reporters believe Baghdadi was in the area for high-level meetings to strike deals with the veteran jihadi group. But al-Halabi’s neighbours had no idea.
“Even his close neighbours living just 4 meters away, said they didn’t know anything about Halabi or that Baghdadi was there,” Mohamed, a reporter, said.
“It's incredible we had no idea such an important and wanted person was right there.”
Source: The Independent.