In a village in Syria, residents took cover, watched and hid as U.S. forces assaulted the house next door, killing the leader of ISIS.
The neighbors had never heard anything like it. The sudden roar of attack helicopters woke up the families living in a pastoral patch of northwestern Syria after midnight. They huddled in basements, storerooms and bedrooms. “What’s happening, Dad?” a neighbor, Abu Omar, recalled his son asking. A voice speaking Arabic blared from a loudspeaker as American forces ordered the occupants of one house to give themselves up, witnesses told a New York Times reporter at the scene. “Everyone will be safe if you surrender,” the voice said, Abu Omar recalled. “Those who remain will die.” The United States hailed the rare airborne raid by commandos in a rebel-held patch of Syria early Thursday as a major success against terrorism, saying it had ended the life of the shadowy leader of the Islamic State, known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi. But for the families who lived near the site of his final stand, on the outskirts of the town of Atmeh, near Syria’s border with Turkey, the raid made for a night of surprise and terror. A man who gave his name as Abu Muhammad, one of five neighbors interviewed by The Times on Thursday, said that his family had been so scared by what they heard outside that they did not even peek out of the windows. Then they heard heavy banging on their door and opened it to find American commandos and an Arabic-speaking interpreter. They were told they would not be harmed, and were directed to flee the house and hide behind another building until the confrontation was over, Abu Muhammad said. They did as they were told. When the raid was over two hours later,13 bodies were recovered from the rubble, rescue workers said, including six children. Most were killed, U.S. officials said, when Mr. al-Qurayshi refused to surrender and instead detonated explosives that killed him and members of his family. The operation highlighted the ability of ISIS to seek refuge in pockets of chaos left by Syria’s 10-year civil war: The leader of the world’s most fearsome terrorist organization was hiding out on the third floor of a simple, cinder-block house surrounded by olive groves many miles from his group’s traditional redoubt. At its height, the Islamic State controlled territory the size of Britain that spanned the Syria-Iraq border. The United States and other nations partnered with local forces in both countries to fight the jihadists, and pushed them from their last patch of territory in eastern Syria in early 2019.
