The Strangers Next Door

"They kept to themselves and our kids played with their kids occasionally outside, but we never socialized with them."

"We thought they could have gone through a lot, but as you know, here everyone has a tragedy and people rarely speak of what happened to them these years and everyone prefers to keep to themselves."

Ameena, resident of the ground floor, Atmeh, Syria

Interior of a building destroyed in the aftermath of a counter-terrorism mission conducted by the U.S. Special Forces  Reuters

When Osama bin Laden established himself and his family in a compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, his neighbours were not familiar with the presence of an Islamist terrorist warlord in their midst. There was a Pakistani military garrison for elite officers in the very near vicinity and it's quite likely they had knowledge of his presence. And a next-door neighbour, a Pakistani doctor had his suspicions. His aid to the CIA in positively identifying the occupants of the bin-Laden compound when on a medical pretext he gained entry, earned him the reward of imprisonment by the government of Pakistan, as a traitor.

This was not the case with Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi, past-current head of Islamic State. His presence in the small town in a corner of Syria full of refugees fleeing 11 years of civil war, ostensibly as yet another misplaced person was not questioned by the nearby residents. He had rented two floors of a three-story building serving as home to a number of families. His family was on the third floor, and other members of ISIL who had his confidence were on the second floor.

 

From the second floor, a man and a woman exchanged fire with the several dozen U.S. troops that had been helicoptered to the town, surrounding the building. Before the exchange of fire the U.S. military had instructed all those occupying the first floor of the building to evacuate, and they did. Soon afterward, before being confronted by the presence of U.S. military personnel within the building, Quraishi blew himself up, evading capture, in the process killing his wife and children along with others located on the second and third floors of the building

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People inspect a destroyed house following an operation by the U.S. military in the Syrian village of Atmeh, in Idlib province, Syria, on Feb. 3.  Ghaith Alsayed/The Associated Press

Locals had been of the belief that Quraishi was a Syrian merchant who had fled Aleppo, bringing his family with him to Atmeh, distant from Syrian front lines, and close to the Turkish border. No one imagined that the Iraqi head of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was living among them. He kept his children  out of sight for the most part, though they occasionally accompanied their mother on shopping expeditions in the town.

 

The death of this, the second head of ISIL, follows a pattern. In 2019 an American assault force entered Idlib province four miles from the Turkish border. After dispatching ISIS forces that "demonstrated hostile intent against U.S.Forces" by two airstrikes from U.S. helicopters, they continued on to the nearby compound of ISIL founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, surrounding it and urging people within to leave, among them 11 children.

Just as they did when they confronted and shot the al-Qaeda leader in Abbotabad, U.S. forces retrieved documents and electronics from the Quraishi compound, before detonating explosives to destroy a building that could become a 'shrine' to the former leader. To "ensure that it would not be a shrine or otherwise memorable in any way". On that occasion too, Baghdadi who had taken himself and his family into a tunnel, detonated a suicide vest collapsing the tunnel, killing three young children with him.

Beyond the internally displaced millions in war-torn Syria there are also foreign Islamists, dedicated fighters and volunteers for jihad. Crowded throngs of people seeking haven from the Alawite Syrian regime's killing machine of Bashar al-Assad. In the attack and blast on the three-story building in Atmeh, thirteen people altogether were killed once the raid began, including four women and six children.

Building destroyed in the aftermath of a counter-terrorism mission conducted by the U.S. Special Operations Forces   Reuters