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Did Turkey Know About Baghdadi's Location?

Recently, U.S. special forces dramatically eliminated the leader of the Islamic State (IS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Baghdadi was discovered in Syria’s Idlib province in a safe house in the town of Barisha where he had been staying for as many as seven months. The safe house was owned by a commander in the al-Qaeda linked jihadist group, Hurras al-Din, to whom Baghdadi had been paying protection money. The U.S. was tipped off that Baghdadi was there by the Syrian Defense Forces, our Kurdish-led ally in Syria, which had a spy in Baghdadi’s circle.

Despite the fact that Turkey, our NATO ally, is just three miles away from Barisha and has troops all over the Idlib province, that nation had little to no involvement in the mission against Baghdadi.

Turkey may have provided some useful intelligence to the U.S., although it doesn’t seem to be specifically about Baghdadi, and it also doesn’t appear to be a large amount. Certainly it was much less than the “vital intelligence” provided by the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds. And obviously, the Turkish military was not involved in the actual attack. The U.S. did not even inform the Turkish government that we were specifically targeting Baghdadi, as there were “concerns the information would be compromised.” Instead, Turkey was only notified that a raid was coming when U.S. forces came close to its borders. This is the same notification the U.S. provided to adversaries such as Russia and Syria. And the operation was launched not from the main U.S. regional U.S. airbase, in İncirlik Turkey, but from much further away in northern Iraq.

This tells us quite a bit about Turkey. And nothing good.

(For the whole article, please click here)

By Adam Turner
Newsmax
November 12, 2019