Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

Pentagon Updates Killing of ISIS Leader By U.S. Forces. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired February 03, 2022 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:00:00]

QUESTION: Hi, John. Two quick questions.

What happened to his body? Was it carried away, like what the U.S. did with bin Laden's body, or was it too badly damaged to do anything with?

And, two, an administration official told reporters today this has been planned for a long, long time. The president had been presented in December with a tabletop model of the compound or the building. Why was the raid now vs. maybe two or three weeks ago or even a month ago? Can you give any -- shed any light on that?

JOHN KIRBY, PENTAGON PRESS SECRETARY: Yes. His body was left at the site.

As for the timing, it is correct. This was a mission long planned, months in the planning, as I mentioned to Jen. But, look, you have to build enough context around the individual's pattern of life. And you have to factor in external factors that you don't get to control, like the weather.

So, lots of things go into making a decision about when you execute a raid of this complexity and this danger. And there were a lot of factors that had to line up to be just right. You have to make sure that your intelligence is solid and that the individual that you're going after is, in fact, at the location you believe him to be, and that all the external factors, the -- not just the weather, but the ability to operate at that particular time of day able to have enough visibility.

All those things factor in. So it was multiple factors. It all came together, such that this was the best window to execute this mission. And I would remind you that it's not like we were just sitting on our hands for those months. I mean, these -- as you probably saw in the secretary's statement,

these special operations forces conducted dozens of rehearsals to make sure that they could get this exactly right.

OK. Mike Brest.

QUESTION: Hi, Mr. Kirby. Thanks for taking my question.

I'm hoping you can provide a little insight into where ISIS stands right now, the threat they pose, between the raid at the prison two weeks ago and Abdullah's assassination. Where do things stand in Syria, as well as globally?

KIRBY: Well, I will tell you what. They're leaderless today. And that's a significant blow. This is not something that we believe ISIS is going to just be able to get over real quickly and real easily.

That said, they are not the force that they were in 2014, as we all remember that -- their growth and rapid acceleration across Iraq and Syria. This is a -- ISIS is not the significant -- a threat of the same significant nature that they were back then.

But they still remain a viable threat. And we have talked about that many times, that this is a group that wants to reconstitute its strength, wants to continue to attack and kill and maim and terrorize. And Hajji Abdullah was very much involved in trying to resuscitate the group and to grow their capabilities.

They remain -- as we have said many times, they remain dangerous. They remain a threat to our national security, to the lives of other innocents. And we're going to, as the secretary said in his statement today, we're going to stay at it.

Travis Tritten.

QUESTION: Hey, John. Thanks.

A couple of quick questions.

First, on the efforts to get civilians out of the building, you said they had called out to them with a bullhorn. Can you say specifically how long they gave civilians to leave the building? And, secondly, when we look at photos of the compound and we see the damage to the building, was that primarily from the suicide bomb or were U.S. munitions used on that building?

Thanks.

KIRBY: The damage you see in the picture, with the third floor collapsed onto the second, and even more than that, then that was caused by Abdullah igniting an explosive device, which, as I said, killed himself and his family.

And, as for time, look, Travis, I don't have a minute-by-minute. There were numerous calls made to encourage everyone in the building to leave. Numerous calls were made. And, at some point, not too far into the operation, Abdullah exploded this device.

And that precipitated more activity by at least one shooter from the building. That led to U.S. forces going in.

[13:05:07]

And to your point about how much time do we give people, I would remind that U.S. forces actually extricated four children from the second floor after they went into the building.

So, the efforts to save the lives of innocents wasn't just in the opening gambit here with the bullhorn. It was well into the operation. It was something that was ever-present on their minds.

Mike Glenn?

QUESTION: Yes, John. Thanks.

Tony asked you (INAUDIBLE) question (INAUDIBLE). Do you believe that this raid might have prevented any future specific terrorist (INAUDIBLE) that they were going to carry out?

KIRBY: You were kind of breaking up, Mike.

I think your question was, do we have information that his death has disrupted a specific attack? Is that what you asked?

QUESTION: Yes, that's it. Yes, that's it.

KIRBY: I don't have information that suggests that, Mike.

But I would remind that this was the leader of ISIS, and he was a very hands-on leader. He was involved in helping direct a lot of operations. So we have no doubt that his death will have a blow on ISIS and their potential to conduct future operations.

I do want to remind that they are still a threat. And we're not -- nobody is taking a victory lap here. We're going to stay at this. They still remain a threat. They still espouse this extreme ideology and this intent to kill, to maim, to terrorize. And so we're going to stay focused on it.

Dan Lamothe.

QUESTION: Thanks for your time.

I'm hoping maybe we can draw you out and flesh out some details on some of these tabletop exercises. It sounds like they went back as far as at least December involving senior commanders and that type of thing.

Can you lay out a bit of what this looked like in terms of how far back it goes, who it involved, that kind of thing?

Thank you.

KIRBY: Yes, Dan, I'm not going to be able to go into more detail than I already have.

Again, this was months in the planning, several months in the planning. It included actual physical rehearsals, as I said, dozens by the special operations forces, as well, as you can imagine, some tabletop planning as well.

But I don't have a ticktock of exactly how all that process worked out. It was extensively planned, extensively resourced, and, quite frankly, extensively informed over the course of several months.

Jen.

QUESTION: John, if I could take you to Russia and Ukraine, there's a report that the U.S. has evidence that Russia has developed a plan approved at the highest levels in Moscow to create a pretext for invading Ukraine by falsely pinning the attack on Ukrainian forces.

That could involve alleged casualties in Eastern Ukraine, but also inside Russia. It's being reported by "The Washington Post."

Is that report accurate? Is -- has that intelligence been declassified? What can you tell us?

KIRBY: What I can tell you is that, first of all, we have discussed this idea of false flags by the Russians before. We have made no secret of that.

And we do have information that it is -- that the Russians are likely to want to fabricate a pretext for an invasion, which, again, is right out of their playbook.

One option is the Russian government, we think, is planning to stage a fake attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence forces against Russian sovereign territory or against Russian-speaking people, to therefore justify their action.

As part of this fake attack, we believe that Russia would produce a very graphic propaganda video, which would include corpses and actors that would be depicting mourners, and images of destroyed locations, as well as military equipment, at the hands of Ukraine or the West, even to the point where some of this equipment would be made to look like it was Western-supplied Ukrainian -- to Ukraine equipment.

So, this is -- and this is just one example that we can talk about today. We're watching this across the board. We have seen these kinds of activity by the Russians in the past. And we believe it's important when we see it like this, and we can, to call it out.

QUESTION: This is being briefed on the Hill right now?

Part of the -- Austin and Milley are on the Hill.

(CROSSTALK)

KIRBY: They're on the Hill in a classified briefing to talk about the whole spate of things we're concerned about with respect to Russia and Ukraine.

[13:10:00]

I won't -- it's a classified briefing, so I'm obviously not going to get into an agenda item with you here in terms of everything they're talking about. But they're both up on the Hill, communicating with members of Congress what we're seeing writ large, and what we're doing about it to help our NATO allies.

QUESTION: But how do you know that it has been approved at the highest level of the Kremlin, this particular case?

KIRBY: I would just say that our experience is that very little of this nature is not approved at the highest levels of the Russian government.

QUESTION: And, by that, you mean Putin?

KIRBY: The highest levels of the Russian government.

Kellie Meyer.

QUESTION: Hi, John. Thanks for taking my question. I have two, if I can.

You mentioned the mechanical issue on the helicopter. Those involved OK and any other issues we aren't aware of, or did everything run like clockwork?

And the second on the U.S. Army dismissing unvaccinated soldiers. Are any of them the ones deploying or on high alert to deploy to Eastern European allies around Ukraine?

KIRBY: Refer you to the Army in terms of who they're discharging with respect to the vaccine mandate. But I suspect that there's privacy concerns there, Kellie, so I don't want to speak for the Army. But I don't know that they're going to be able to give you that level of specificity.

It remains a lawful order. It remains a readiness issue. The vaccines work. And we want everybody to take them and to keep safe, to keep their unit safe.

As for the helicopter crew, my understanding is that they're all fine. As we said at the top, there were no U.S. casualties. And that would include the helicopter crew, and it wasn't a crash landing. They landed safely. Again, it was a drive train issue that rendered that helicopter unusable for the rest of the operation.

So, obviously, it was destroyed, but the crew are safe and sound.

Sylvie from AFP.

QUESTION: Hello. Sorry. Sorry.

Can you tell us how many helicopters and how many U.S. troops were involved?

KIRBY: Yes, Sylvie, I'm are not going to answer that question, actually.

Back when I opened up the press conference, I told you there's going to be some detail we're not going to be able to provide because we want to preserve our ability to continue to conduct these sorts of operations.

So what I would tell you is that we had exactly the force levels and exactly the resources we needed to conduct this operation. And I will leave it at that.

Tara Copp.

QUESTION: Thanks, John.

Following up on Bob's question, can you confirm whether any sort of intelligence was taken from the compound, any computer drives or cell phones?

And then, secondly, to follow up on Luis' question, the decisions that were made in this raid, did they incorporate any lessons learned from the civilian casualty report done after the August 29 strike?

Thank you.

KIRBY: I have kind of addressed that second question before, as -- when Luis asked it. I mean, we always try to avoid civilian harm.

This operation was of a completely different character than the airstrike that happened on the 29th of August. But we -- but, in general, we always try to learn from previous missions, from previous operations.

These are two completely different operations. And the desire to avoid civilian harm was baked in months ago into this particular plan. In fact, the decision itself to conduct a raid using special operations forces speaks volumes of the degree to which the president was trying to avoid civilian harm and, quite frankly, putting our forces at greater risk because of the -- because of the decision to make a raid like this.

And I'm sorry, but I should have written your other question down, and I didn't do it.

QUESTION: Oh, about the -- can you confirm whether any sort of computer drives or cameras or anything else were taken from the compound that could provide actionable intelligence moving forward?

KIRBY: Yes.

Look, as I told Bob, I'm not going to get into talking about intelligence matters one way or the other. It is common practice when we conduct raids like this that we try to collect material that can help us and inform us in terms of our ability to disrupt future attacks and to conduct future operations.

And I think I'm just going to leave it at that.

Nancy Youssef.

QUESTION: Thank you.

I wonder if you could clarify a couple points. On the explosion that happened on the third floor, does the U.S. believe that the ISIS leader was wearing a suicide vest, or that it was an explosive separate of that? And was it one explosive?

Can you tell us if there was any deconfliction that happened with any other nation? And can you tell us who will lead the review of any possible civilian casualties by the U.S.?

[13:15:10]

Thank you.

KIRBY: There's been no decision to do a review or investigation right now, Nancy

This -- again, this operation is not even 24 hours' old. As the secretary said, we certainly are willing to take a look to see if there's any possibility that anything that we did might have caused harm to innocent life. But I have no investigation review to speak to today.

As for the explosion, all I can tell you is what we have already said. There was a large explosion early on in the operation on the third floor, which killed Hajji Abdullah and his family. We believe he detonated that explosion.

We cannot say at this time exactly what this device was. So, I leave it at that.

And then you had -- your first question. I'm not good at -- I got to write these down. What was your first question?

QUESTION: Just to be clear, I was just asking. When you say that review, though, that you said the secretary would be doing, I'm just trying to understand who would do that.

And then the question was, was there any deconfliction with any other nations in the run-up to this?

KIRBY: So, look, we're not calling -- we're not calling for a review right now, Nancy.

Again, this operation literally just happened last night. What the secretary said in the statement was, we will -- we're going to take a look and see if there's any possibility that any action that we conducted might have led to the loss of innocent life.

And if there is, then we will make decisions follow on that. But I don't want to leave you with the impression that there's an investigation in the offing here. That's not where we are at this point.

As for deconfliction, I would tell you that appropriate deconfliction at the appropriate time was conducted in order to make sure that this operation could proceed safely. And I think I will leave that there.

QUESTION: Meaning with the Russians?

KIRBY: Appropriate deconfliction as happens in that part of Syria was conducted in this case.

Let's see. Helene Cooper.

QUESTION: Hi. Thanks, John.

Does this commando raid in Syria send a message of any kind to Vladimir Putin?

KIRBY: This raid was not meant to send a message to any other nation. It was meant to remove Hajji Abdullah from his leadership of ISIS.

And, to that degree, it was successful. And we are immensely proud of the forces that conducted this, that planned it, resourced it, executed, rehearsed for it. It says a lot about our capability in counterterrorism, our focus, our continued focus on the ISIS threat, and our ability to plan and conduct an execution of this magnitude and with this complexity with the utmost of professionalism and skill, and, quite frankly, secrecy.

I will take a couple more.

Yes.

QUESTION: Did U.S. forces collect any information or documents, whatever, materials from the building?

(CROSSTALK)

KIRBY: I have already -- I have dealt with this question before a couple of times.

It is routine that we try to collect useful material when raids of this kind are conducted. I'm not going to speak with any specificity about this one.

OK, thanks, everybody. Appreciate it.

ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Thank you for joining us. I'm Ana Cabrera in New York.

And you have been listening into the Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, shedding light on what was a major U.S. strike against terrorism. And I want to do a quick reset for those of you just joining us.

Here's what we know. U.S. Special Forces killed the leader of ISIS. His name is Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. This was an overnight mission. The White House is calling his death a catastrophic blow to ISIS.

Social media in Syria claims to have captured the gunfire from U.S. helicopters, and, here, in the light of day, before-and-after images of the compound. On the right, you can see the destruction.

And we're told there were no U.S. casualties. But children and women are among those killed.

President Biden spoke earlier. He says the terrorist detonated a bomb as the U.S. forces closed in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Last night, operating on my orders, United States military forces successfully removed a major terrorist threat to the world, the global leader of ISIS.

[13:20:00]

We do know that as our troops approached to capture the terrorist, in a final act of desperate cowardice, he -- with no regard to the lives of his own family or others in the building, he chose to blow himself up, not just with a vest, but to blow up that third floor, rather than face justice for the crimes he has committed, taking several members of his family with him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Let's go live to CNN's Barbara Starr at the Pentagon.

And we just heard John Kirby address those civilian casualties, say they made many efforts to try to get civilians and those who are innocent out of harm's way. He also said this was months in the planning, Barbara.

What more are we learning about this mission?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, it is quite interesting that at this briefing we all just listened to, the bulk of the questions, I would say, were about civilian casualties, which underscores the concern and sensitivity about that issue.

Now, what John Kirby said is that it was President Biden's decision, rather than conduct an airstrike, which would have been perhaps safer for U.S. troops than a ground operation, but would not have necessarily protected civilians, the president made the decision to go a more dangerous route, and put U.S. troops right on the ground in this part of Northwest Syria, right at the place where they were going to seek to conduct this mission.

So that's the first step. He said that they were on the ground for about two hours, part of the plan. That is an extraordinary amount of time for special operations are really for any U.S. forces in the middle of a potentially very dangerous operation to be in one place. But they planned to be there for two hours as part of the effort to

protect civilians. And we don't know yet just really how successful they were.

There's been a good deal of discussion that Qurashi blew himself up on the third floor of this house, along with his wife and other people, but that children were rescued, and some civilians were rescued. There was additional -- a lieutenant apparently killed and his wife, Ana, below them on a second floor, and a child, but Kirby could not explain how that child was killed.

People outside the compound were killed. They were deemed to be hostile, people with hostile intent. So it's all still just a little bit murky, the Pentagon saying they're going to continue to take a look at it all, stopping short of saying an official investigation.

But even Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he wants to ensure that they know everything that happened here regarding civilian casualties. So, let's set that aside for a minute.

Who was this guy? Well, they described Qurashi as very hands-on, as a leader of ISIS involved in monitoring recent operations quite recently, just in the last few weeks, which I think is fair to say that's a big hint that they had eyes and ears on this guy for some time, and they had a sense of what he was up to.

They were watching the location and moved in when they thought they were ready and they thought they could get to him. President Biden making that final decision. A model of the house was even made.

And just a couple of interesting details that we have learned here. U.S. officials are saying that they were worried that he might blow up explosives in the house, so they had a U.S. military engineer make calculations whether the house could survive that kind of explosion or it would collapse in on itself, causing even more casualties.

The ruling they got from the engineer was the house could survive a detonation inside. That's really an interesting tidbit. That really goes not just to the -- what the Pentagon wants us to focus on, which is their concern about civilian casualties, but it goes to the level of intelligence, because, to make that calculation, the engineer would have had to have some very specific understanding of the construction of that building.

So it's a tidbit that just helps us understand the level of intelligence they had before they conducted this raid.

CABRERA: Barbara Starr, thank you for all that reporting.

Let's continue the discussion.

And joining us now is CNN military analyst and retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton and Bob Baer, a former CIA operative and CNN intelligence and security analyst. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. I do want to say that we have heard a couple of different names for

this leader. His official name, we read out, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. We also heard John Kirby refer to him as Hajji Abdullah. It's the same person, again, considered the leader of ISIS.

And yet, Colonel, ISIS hasn't really been top of mind, here in the U.S., at least, for some time. So what does all this tell you about how the Biden administration views the ISIS threat? And what else stood out to you from what we learned at this press conference?

[13:25:12]

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, I think the biggest takeaway from what the Biden administration thinks of ISIS is that they still see it as a big danger.

They know that any major terrorist operation, any successful terrorist operation, whether it takes place in the U.S. or Europe or even the Middle East, would bring ISIS back on the front pages. And that's why they decided that they needed to eliminate the leader, al-Qurashi, and decided that this was the time to do it.

From -- my takeaways from this are that he has -- he was a key, important leader, the operation was executed almost flawlessly, and there were a lot of different aspects to it that point to the detailed intelligence work, what we call intelligence, preparation of the battle space. That took place.

And it shows you not only the professionalism, but the competence of the forces involved in this. And we can be very proud that these people did this in the way that they did. It was, from all accounts so far, a pretty successful operation.

CABRERA: And, Bob, how much of an ISIS resurgence has there been in Syria specifically?

BOB BAER, CNN INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY ANALYST: Well, it's coming back.

They raided a prison and took it over for several days, so they can mount an assault on a lot of places around the world. But what concerns me is, you look at the map, look at Idlib Province, and it's right on the Turkish border. You could get people across that border sort of any time you want and through Turkey with false passports, and the Turks have caught a bunch of people.

So I agree with the White House and the Pentagon that ISIS remains a threat, and particularly in a related group, ISIS group, in Afghanistan. You have got potentially a million refugees, and a lot of these people are going to end up in Europe, but continuing with the jihad.

So this is sort of a never-ending battle. And it was a brilliant raid. It's not the Pentagon's fault, it's not special forces' fault those civilians died. That room was clearly wired waiting for an assault. And these people are committed to martyrdom. And what they hoped to do was to kill any assaulters coming through

the front door. So the planning was really the only thing you could do.

CABRERA: The White House calls this a catastrophic blow to ISIS.

But, if I recall, after the former ISIS leader al-Baghdadi was killed in 2019, we discussed how ISIS is structured so that losing the figurehead or the leader wouldn't dismantle the organization. Bob, what impact does it actually have to take out this one man?

BAER: Yes, well, he was a leader. He was an Islamic leader, had studied Islam. And the reason he took the name Qurashi Hashimi was pretending to be a descendant of the prophet, whether he was or not.

So you take these spiritual leaders and operational leaders and remove them, and it disrupts the organization. No doubt we will hear about in the coming weeks or months about another leader. But he's got to start all over again. And don't forget, these people can no longer, if they know what they're doing, use cell phones or computers.

And you depend on sources on the ground. And I think something probably came through the Turks, because they're right on the border. And they want to stop this as much as we do.

CABRERA: And, Colonel, we heard questions also about Russia. In terms of the timing of this raid, I think about resources and the U.S. sending more troops into Eastern Europe to deal with the threat of Russia in that part of the world. Now you have this situation here.

How does all of that, I guess, strategy -- does it complicate the strategy and how the U.S. response to conflicts?

LEIGHTON: Well, I think what it does, Ana, is, it shows that we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

What we're looking at is a specialized operation that was basically a precision operation. That is very different from the type of operation that would have to take place in and around Ukraine.

So, this shows that we can do these things. But, unlike Admiral Kirby, I would say that this does, in fact, whether intended or not, send a message to the Russians that we are very capable of doing many different things, and they had better think twice before they mount something in Ukraine.

So, that, I think, is a very important point that needs to be made. How Moscow would see this would clearly influence, I think, some of the things that they're going to do next.

CABRERA: Well, I appreciate both of you very much, Bob Baer and Colonel Cedric Leighton.

Thank you very much for joining us.