Rich and I just finished recording our TMR podcast, and in the new episode we have a few things to say about the attack by U.S. special forces on a compound in northeastern Syria, which resulted in the death of the leader (or emir) of ISIS, Abu al-Hashimi al-Qurashi.
The Pentagon explains that, upon realizing he was under assault, Qurashi detonated a suicide bomb, killing himself and twelve family members, including women and children. I know of no reason to doubt this account, but it will obviously be questioned. In the course of botching the evacuation from Afghanistan, the Biden administration grossly misrepresented as a “righteous strike” a retaliatory drone missile-attack that was intended to target an ISIS terrorist, who was said to be poised to bomb more U.S. troops at the airport in Kabul. Instead, the operation mistakenly targeted Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for an American humanitarian aid group. Initially, the Pentagon maintained that, in addition to terrorists, three civilians might have been collateral casualties in the “righteous strike”; it turned out that the errant strike killed ten people in a residential neighborhood, including seven children.
So we’ll see what develops as the matter is investigated. Hopefully, it happened the way they say it happened. For now, I’d make these points.
First, Qurashi was, in small compass, a fitting history of ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. (The second “S” in ISIS, is often rendered as “Syria,” but al-Sham actually means Greater Syria. Significantly, that illustrates its broader ambitions; al-Sham includes all or parts of Syria, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Turkey.)
Not surprisingly, you can find a great Qurashi backgrounder at the Long War Journal, courtesy of Bill Roggio and Andrew Tobin. As they explain, ISIS is a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda, which detached after first becoming the terror network’s Iraqi affiliate (al-Qaeda in Iraq, often referred to as AQI) under the notorious Abu al-Musab al-Zarqawi. AQI/ISIS’s military prowess owed to some cross-pollination with the brutal intelligence apparatus and armed forces of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
Qurashi personified this history. A recognized scholar of sharia (Islam’s legal and societal framework), he fought in Saddam’s armed forces and later joined AQI, as it broke away from the mother ship and became rival ISIS. Qurashi was captured by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2008 but released when President Obama followed through on President Bush’s agreement that U.S. troops would be withdrawn by 2009. In the interim, he cooperated with U.S. interrogators, which is said to have led to some American combat ops that eliminated jihadists who might have been rivals of his. In any event, he pledged fealty (bay’ah) to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ended up playing leadership roles in now-infamous ISIS incursions — e.g., the “caliphate’s” capture of Mosul and the genocidal massacre of the Yazidis (a Kurdish minority in northern Iraq). Qurashi rose up the ranks and took control of ISIS when American forces killed Baghdadi in 2019.
Second, remember that even before President Trump authorized the strike against Baghdadi, he ordered strikes against a Syrian air base in 2017 and on Syrian chemical-weapons sites in 2018, both in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. It was not uncommon to find critics questioning the then-president’s legal authority to carry out such attacks. I know because I was among those making them. My point is not to rehash these objections. It is to note that the issues of legal authority and what exactly our forces are doing in Syria are almost completely absent from coverage of the Biden-approved operation against Qurashi.
Instead, the attack that ended in the death of a jihadist leader, who has been sought by American intelligence and military forces for a couple of years, is mainly treated as a triumph for Biden. Perhaps this is because things have been going so badly for the president that his sympathetic media are happy to highlight the rare thing that seems to have gone right. Perhaps it’s because, unlike when he opposed the bin Laden raid in Pakistan — President Obama wisely ignored the, um, sage’s advice — this time Biden calculated that offing a committed, savagely competent anti-American terrorist leader would be a net-plus for our security. But in any event there is not much questioning the legality or wisdom of it.
Clearly, this is political. Trump got it coming and going: He was rebuked by his critics both for conducting combat operations in Syria and for pulling troops out so they could no longer conduct combat operations in Syria. It is not totally impossible to square these two positions, and not all tireless Trump detractors took both positions. A lot of the discordance, however, owes to Trump’s lightning-rod quality — he could do no right as far as many critics were concerned.
With Biden, not only is there understanding; there is incoherent cheerleading. When the president pulled out of Afghanistan last year, it was on the rationale that we did not need to have forces on the ground there because we had “over the horizon” response capabilities. This was absurd. To be sure, there are principled arguments that leaving Afghanistan was the right call (though there is no defending how the exit was executed). But “over the horizon” is not one of them. The nearest assets we now have to respond to anti-American jihadist operations in Afghanistan are about a thousand miles away; more to the point, they can’t be set in motion by contemporaneous intelligence because we don’t have boots on the ground. Yet Biden fans are arguing that the operation against Qurashi shows that his “over the horizon” counterterrorism strategy is effective. That’s ridiculous. Even though there is no congressional authorization for military operations in Syria, we have nearly a thousand troops in-country (it could be more, but much is classified so it’s impossible to tell). The Qurashi strike was not an aerial attack set in motion from over the horizon. It was a nighttime raid conducted by U.S. commandos, mostly choppered into Idlib province (and supported by combat jets and drones).
“Over the horizon” is a pretext for evacuation from Afghanistan, not a security strategy for that country or any other. There are still al-Qaeda jihadists using Afghanistan as a platform for terrorist attacks. As Jim continues to report, Biden’s ceding of Afghanistan to our Taliban enemies was a betrayal, and it has encouraged other anti-American rogues. It has also, by the way, become a humanitarian catastrophe, just as Biden was advised would happen.
Finally, the fact that the latest episode of U.S. combat in Syria is likely to be a net-plus should not obscure the fact that both our basis for being there and our strategy — what exactly are we seeking to accomplish? — are murky at best (I am a longtime Syria naysayer). The seminal congressional authorities are use-of-force provisions that stretch back over 20 years, and countless things have changed in the interim. ISIS, for example, did not yet exist when the post-9/11 AUMF was enacted in 2001.
Congress should long ago have made this a priority, but it has instead been AWOL — delegating seemingly boundless power to the commander in chief to carry out wartime missions in the places and against the targets of presidential choosing, under the vague auspices of counterterrorism. Lawmakers go on television to complain when things go wrong, wave pom-poms when things go right, but otherwise act as if the use of American force is none of their concern. That is not supposed to be the way this works.
To be clear, I am not saying the raid was lawless. There are legalistic ways to justify it as a proper application of the AUMF (though an awfully attenuated one), or perhaps even as a legitimate exercise of the president’s inherent powers under Article II of the Constitution. Nevertheless, it should not be necessary to do mental acrobatics every time our government uses military force. The authority for acting should be part of the conversation, and it remains a conversation Congress is obligated to have.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-closer-look-at-bidens-takedown-of-isis-leader-al-qurashi/