The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump Says ISIS Leader Is Dead

Episode Date: October 27, 2019

Trump declared that U.S. forces have brought "the world's No. 1 terrorist leader to justice" and that no U.S. troops were killed or injured in the raid. Some experts fear the resurgence of the Islamic State now that Trump has announced a pullout of U.S. forces from Syria, with dozens of ISIS fighters escaping from Kurdish custody in the last month. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national security editor Phil Ewing, and senior editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is 1.38 p.m. on Sunday, October 27th, and we are here on a Sunday because the founder and leader of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is dead. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest as American special forces were closing in on him. President Trump announced the news from the White House this morning. Last night, the United States brought the world's number one terrorist leader to justice. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and Correspondent. And we are going to talk through the significance of this news, what it means for U.S. foreign policy and also domestic politics. But I want to start at the beginning. Phil, who is Baghdadi? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was an Iraqi cleric who has been mixed up in terrorism and extremism for very many years. And he actually was captured by American forces in Iraq in a previous life and incarcerated and became very radical when he was in American hands. And then when he got out of custody, he got into the A League of Extremism Terrorism and went on a few years ago to proclaim himself the caliph of a new

Islamic state, which he said would include much of northern and western Iraq and northern Syria. This was also during the Syrian civil war, which was also taking place. The other thing that he did was appreciate how powerful the brand of ISIS could be. And so there are a lot of terror groups in Africa, on the Arabian Peninsula, and even in Afghanistan, in Asia Minor and elsewhere that have brought the ISIS banner to themselves, even though they're the same old terror groups they used to be, because of how vicious and how terrifying the Islamic State was in its home turf in Syria and Iraq. And so ISIS, the brand, became even bigger than Baghdadi,

who was important, but not a household name in the same way that, for example, Osama bin Laden was. And the president announcing this was certainly much needed good news for the White House. I mean, after the bipartisan criticism of his pullout of troops that had been working with Syrian Kurds, you know, he's able to now sort of turn this around and say, you know, what he's doing in that part of the world is working in his view. Let's go back to that announcement, because it was something. President Trump this morning went into the diplomatic reception room in the White House and delivered an opening statement that was about 10 minutes long, then took questions for reporters for another 40 minutes, and over the course of that described in incredible detail the operation. He reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him

down. He ignited his vest killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. The tunnel had caved in on it in addition. But test results gave certain immediate and totally positive identification. It was him. It was kind of incredible to hear the president describe what we would call tactical details about how this went down. He described eight helicopters flying for more than an hour and the special operations forces blowing a hole in the wall of this compound in western Syria, going in and engaging in what sounds like it might have been a firefight with the people there, and then ultimately chasing down Baghdadi himself in the way that we heard about at the top of the pod.

You know, Phil, I do wonder, I think a lot of people probably have the question of whether or not the amount of detail he did go into was appropriate or raise his eyebrows in the national security community. I don't know what your thought is on that. Well, so the question is, was there anything in the president's statement that would cause problems for these special operations forces? I don't know the answer to that yet. But what we're going to have to watch over the coming days and weeks here is how the president's critics and opponents who, Domenico, as you mentioned earlier on, have been going after him very aggressively respond to this news

because Baghdadi's removal from the battlefield is unabashed good news for humanity. And it also gives the White House the ability this week to change the subject in a very positive way for the administration following this announcement. Yeah, I can't think of a time when a president of the United States has talked about a military operation with language that's this vivid. The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him. Yeah, I mean, the only thing that it reminds me of, and not the language wise, but obviously, President Obama coming to the cameras and talking about, you know, getting Osama bin Laden. The thing about that, that was curious, you had a bunch of people dragging up old tweets from Trump because there's a tweet for everything.

And he said, stop congratulating Obama for killing bin Laden. The Navy SEALs killed bin Laden. And that certainly was a conversation at the time and probably will be now again, too. I want to play one other clip of the president. He did this a lot throughout his remarks where it was almost like he was talking about Baghdadi in a way that was very personal. He died like a dog. He died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming and crying. And frankly, I think it's something that should be brought out so that his followers and all of these young kids that want to leave various countries, including the United States, they should see how he died. He didn't die a hero. He died a coward, crying, whimpering,

screaming, and bringing three kids with him to die a certain death. Why do you think the president is talking about him in this way? You know, part of this is deterrence, right? I mean, for example, Diane Foley, who's the mother of James Foley, who was beheaded by ISIS, had a statement where she put out that said, I hope this will hinder the resurgence of terror groups and pray that captured ISIS fighters will be brought to trial and be accountable. So, you know, the idea here for what he's doing is to try to paint these guys who feel that they're being heroic for their cause that in the end, this is what happened to their leader. The president calls them losers. He's called terrorists losers a number of times since he's been politically active before his inauguration

and of course through till now. And also another big theme for the Trump presidency, as we've talked about on our pod many times is Trump seems to take moments where Obama did one thing and decide to do the opposite thing. Obama in the Osama bin Laden raid had images, including images of Osama bin Laden's corpse, which he decided not to release. And there have been subsequent court cases and litigation about those. And that material has never become public. But Trump volunteered in this statement, maybe we need to put out these pictures of Baghdadi's final moments of this raid, so that it might deter future terrorists. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of those images, whether they're specific ones that comport with what the president said

or not, simply because that would be a left turn away from the right turn taken by the previous administration. The thing I found striking about this press conference, though, was the fact that we did learn that he didn't tell congressional Democratic leaders about it because he was nervous about potentially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or others leaking the information. That is just stunning. I mean, as Phil mentioned earlier, this is the kind of thing that's good for humanity, humankind, for the world, for the United States. This should be the one thing that's above partisanship. And the fact that the level of distrust goes that deep where he feels like he can't trust Democratic leaders.

I mean, that is really unprecedented for something as high level in national security as this. Is there any risk in this kind of language or this, the idea of putting images or ideas about Baghdadi out there? Is there a risk of further radicalizing people? Tam, that's a great question. And it also belongs with a number of other big questions about the state of ISIS, not only in Syria, but in its other franchises around the world following the events of the past few hours. I don't know if we can say one way or the other what effect it might have, but the president seems to be calculating that the right strategy here is to make Baghdadi look bad, as you said, to try and paint him and his followers as these extremists who need to be denigrated by the United States. And he appears to feel that those images being released could help that

and could help prevent future acolytes from joining these extremist groups. Does the death of Baghdadi mean anything about the future of ISIS? Does it weaken ISIS? Does it destroy ISIS? Baghdadi's death does weaken ISIS in the same way that the founder of any important entity being removed one way or the other weakens that entity. And it has been proven that the United States has been very effective at weakening these terror groups by relentlessly going after the leaders, by relentlessly going after so-called facilitators and recruiters. But it doesn't make them go away. So I think that distinction that you made is important. ISIS will be hurt by this. The ISIS brand, the franchise will be hurt by this,

but these terror groups will endure. And what the United States and what the European powers, the Middle Eastern governments do from this moment forward will be as important to the fate of ISIS and extremist groups as this specific action, consequential though it was. We are going to take a quick break. And when we return, we're going to talk about what this means for foreign policy and for domestic politics. This message comes from NPR sponsor ZipRecruiter. Hiring can be a slow process. Cafe Altura COO Dylan Miskiewicz needed to hire a director of coffee. So he went to ZipRecruiter, posted his job, and found the right person in just a few days. Find out why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash weekly. W-E-E-K-L-Y.

Do you know how early you need to be to register to vote? How about the number to call if something's going wrong at your polling station? Or what about the best time of day to cast a ballot? And we're back. This announcement that President Trump made today comes at this time where for the last several weeks, President Trump has been in a firestorm of his own making with Republicans being very upset about his handling of the situation in Syria with Turkey and American allies, the Kurds. Do you guys have any sense of how this or if this big announcement affects the president's policy on the ground. According to what Trump said in his announcement, his intentions are unchanged. As you mentioned, the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and many other Republicans have been attacking Trump from his own right about the decision he's taken to withdraw American forces from Syria. Now here's American forces in Syria bringing about a very consequential operational result. But when you listen to the president talk about it, he said, my view is that we still need to get out of this and that these subsequent disputes between

Syria and Turkey and Iran and Russia are for them to resolve. With one important caveat, the president also wants to leave behind some American forces in eastern Syria to guard oil facilities there. In fact, there have been some reports that there could be mechanized troops or even tanks deployed to protect these oil facilities. The president said he thinks it's smart to protect the oil. And so we're trying to understand as we go through this day by day what exactly will be the final posture for American forces. But overall, according to what Trump said, he's committed to getting out. The only question is whether there'll be more withdrawals elsewhere from the region in the coming months. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, Republican, you know, he had been critical of Trump for pulling out troops with

Syrian Kurds, but he called Baghdadi's death a game changer. I mean, I guess it depends on the game that you're playing. This is a big moment as far as putting sort of a cherry on top of what the US has done over the last five years in particular to try to take down and take out ISIS. You know, it's not the same moment that bin Laden was, but it will be something that probably, you know, at least gives public relations messaging boost to the White House, if nothing else. I mean, I think we should watch the foreign policy handling numbers in the coming days and weeks, because it's been the area that Trump has suffered the most with. So he's really hoping that this will help him. But obviously, Lindsey Graham is not the only Republican and certainly not the only elected

person who has ideas about this. And a lot of them are raising concerns about Syria policy more broadly, and not just this one moment. Domenico, do you have any sense of how something like this can affect a president politically? I mean, certainly this comes as President Trump is dealing with an impeachment inquiry and having one bad headline after another. Is this the kind of thing that can sway public opinion? It depends. I mean, I think that we're so hotly partisan right now that, you know, winning a lot of people over is going to be difficult. I mean, I do think that it's the kind of thing, obviously, it's good news for the United States. It's good news for the world. So

inevitably, at least in the short run, it will help President Trump politically, if you're looking at that calculation. I mean, the killing of Osama bin Laden certainly helped put a floor underneath Barack Obama when he was facing criticism that he was too weak or ineffective or indecisive. When that took place, that certainly helped him as he was heading into his 2012 reelection. Yeah, you got the impression, you know, the White House put out a picture of President Trump in the Situation Room as this was unfolding. Not unlike the picture that the Obama White House put out following the Bin Laden raid. But Baghdadi is not really, you know, a household name in the same way that Bin Laden was. Yeah, I mean, look, it's it's good news, and it'll probably help the president in the short run. All right, that is all for today.

We will be back in your feeds very soon, like tomorrow. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. politics podcast.