The trail that led the Americans to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi unfolds little by little. To find the leader of ISIS, the Arabic acronym for the ISIS group, the US relied in part on information provided by the Kurds.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), one of the groups opposed to Syrian power and partly made up of Kurds from Syria, managed to place a spy in the immediate entourage of the jihadist leader. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, quoting a FDS official, the Kurds have followed him since mid-May.
Their spy also managed to steal an undergarment from Al-Baghdadi. This innocuous appearance would have made it possible to collect DNA and facilitate the identification of the organizer of the attacks of November 2015 in Paris and Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis).
Trump plays down the role of Kurds
Another element was determining in the tracking of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. The Iraqi services have seized the smuggler of several relatives of Baghdadi including one of his wives and a nephew. This decision allowed them to locate the first time the Daesh leader.
While US President Donald Trump has certainly mentioned the role of the Kurds in the elimination of the terrorist leader, he has also tried to minimize their involvement. The United States is accused of having abandoned its Kurdish allies in Syria by removing their soldiers from the north of the country in early October, paving the way for a Turkish offensive in the region. The concomitance of American withdrawal and Kurdish aid in the offensive against Al-Bagdhadi is difficult to defend publicly.
The American newspapers The Washington Post and The New York Times confirm in any case that the Kurds played a decisive role in the operation. The first evokes "determining information". The second, stinging, that the sudden US withdrawal from northern Syria has complicated the task of the US military to carry out the operation: "The death of Al-Bagdhadi occurred despite Trump and not thanks to him ".