Two top Biden administration officials confirmed on Thursday that a US military operation in northern Somalia killed a key ISIS leader and 10 members of the terror group on Wednesday.
“From a mountainous cave complex in northern Somalia, Bilal al-Sudani is assessed to have supported ISIS’ expansion and activities across Africa and beyond the continent,” the first senior administration official said.
After the fact on Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a statement confirming al-death.
“On January 25, on orders from the President, the U.S. military conducted an assault operation in northern Somalia that resulted in the death of a number of ISIS members, including Bilal-al-Sudani, an ISIS leader in Somalia and a key facilitator for ISIS’s global network. Al-Sudani was responsible for fostering the growing presence of ISIS in Africa and for funding the group’s operations worldwide, including in Afghanistan.
” “No civilians were harmed as a result of this operation. We are grateful to our extraordinary service members as well as our intelligence community and other interagency partners for their support to this successful counterterrorism operation,” Austin added.
The US official claims that the US military was prepared to seize al-Sudani, but that the “enemy force’s response” led to al-death. One US service member was bitten by a military dog during the operation, but no US service members or civilians were killed.
One of the two counterterrorism partners the United States informed was the government of Somalia, according to the second official. U.S. military operations in Somalia have mainly targeted al-Shabaab, the country’s preeminent terror group; it is unusual for the United States to conduct an operation against ISIS. U.S. forces carried out an airstrike in Syria at the year’s close, killing two of ISIS’s most senior leaders.
The operation is consistent with President Obama’s stated preference for “over-the-horizon” operations like this one to confront terrorism in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The first official said the operation would yield “important information” for US intelligence however they would not elaborate. On Thursday, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) revealed the operation, saying simply that US forces “conducted a successful counterterrorism action in Somalia” and that “no civilians were hurt or killed.”
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On Thursday, a second high-ranking administration official claimed that the intelligence that led to this operation was originally provided to members of President Joe Biden’s national security team “a number of months ago.” Last Monday, Biden gave the green light for the operation to go ahead.
Although the first official stressed the service members’ “extraordinary preparedness” for the mission, he or she refrained to share specifics on the personnel involved in the operation.
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