As part of then President Barack Obama's transfer of authority policy in Iraq, the US military handed over a slew of military prisoners to the Iraqi government. One of those prisoner transfers looked his US Army officer escort in the eye and said to him, "I'll see you in New York!" The officer was Colonel Kenneth King, who was the commander of the US prison facility this prisoner was transferred from. That facility was named Camp Bucca, named for a military police officer and FDNY fire marshal, Ronald Bucca, who was killed in the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Adding poignancy to this interaction was that the prisoner was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. For the purposes of truth, one can drop the "al-Baghdadi" part as his real name was just Abu Bakr. Like many al-Qaeda terrorists, Abu Bakr added a false family name designed for political purposes to draw some link to the people of Iraq. It didn't work, as al-Qaeda in Iraq was so brutal that it not only alienated itself from Iraqi Shiites, but soon thereafter from the very Iraqi Sunnis whom AQI was counting upon as allies in their campaign to defeat the US led coalition. Instead, the depravity of AQI created a Sunni resistance to them, which eventually became named the Sunni Awakening. Their alliance with the US led to AQI's wholesale defeat in addition to its top leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, dying in a coalition bomb strike.
This is a fate that Abu Bakr shared, as the chief commander of ISIS found his ultimate end this Saturday, 26 Oct 2019, in the back end of a tunnel, when he detonated a suicide vest that not only killed him, but three of his children, as they were all trapped by US special forces in a highly secret mission ordered against the remaining ISIS leadership in Syria. You see, Abu Bakr started out as a tactical commander in AQI, was captured by coalition forces, turned over to the Iraqi government, and then released as part of an ill conceived humanitarian gesture, designed to draw an end to the Iraq War. It didn't work, as Abu Bakr immediately went to work creating a terror organization even more ruthless and evil than AQI.
That new terror group was named ISIS (Islamic State for Iraq and Syria). It went by other names, but ISIS is the one that stuck. Regardless, ISIS went on a campaign of senseless violence the like of which even upset some al-Qaeda terrorists, who considered ISIS actions so evil that it warned against them. Even these warnings were unheeded, as ISIS went about not merely practicing mass murder, but also adopted particularly barbaric tactics, such as locking fellow Muslims in steel cages, setting the prisoner on fire inside the cage, while alive and alert, and watching the prisoner burn to death. ISIS even filmed these spectacles and proudly broadcasted them to the shocked world media.
President Obama labeled ISIS as being the "junior varsity" of Islamic terrorism. Instead, ISIS carved out a territory equal in land mass to most European countries, and for a time, became without question the most politically effective Islamofascist organization on earth! It was not until Donald Trump became President that a truly successful US military campaign was launched to utterly destroy ISIS. That destruction only took several months. What ISIS possessed in viciousness they more than made up for with outright military incompetence! Sadly, the rise of ISIS is also a terrible indication of the wholesale incompetence of domestic military forces operating in Syria and Iraq.
For two weeks before this mission to kill Abu Bakr, and amid great criticism of Donald Trump by the US media, Democrats, and never-Trumpers, for "abandoning" the ISIS mission in Syria, our US military had Abu Bakr in their crosshairs, using information reportedly derived from one of Bakr's senior sub-commanders. Trump authorized a large scale special forces raid on Bakr's compound, which reportedly employed about 80-90 US special forces soldiers. The mission was a spectacular success, as the compound was destroyed, all the terrorists were shot and/or killed, the primary target in Abu Bakr was killed, and a slew of valuable intelligence materials were recovered. In sum, it appears like a mortal blow to the small remnants that ISIS had remaining.
So, in the end, Abu Bakr's bravado about meeting any US soldiers in New York was empty rhetoric from a mad man. Bakr never saw New York City, never was able to effectively plan any attack on the United States directly, and died a craven coward who murdered his own children in a final meaningless act. Islamofascism has always been an evil philosophy, practiced by truly evil people. One more of their ilk has met his just end. Abu Bakr won't be the last Islamic terrorist to die violently, nor will he be the last global jihadist wannabe to make grandiose pronouncements about world conquest against the so-called infidels of the earth.
Despite the critics, Trump is continuing to practice his doctrine, which relies upon swift and totally secret missions to eliminate established threats to the United States, coincidental with quick withdrawal of US military forces. The Trump Doctrine is not isolationist in the least. Instead, it leverages US military technological advantages in global reach, precision strike, and well trained forces, to hit quick, precisely, and lethally. Under Trump, the US will not become bogged down in protracted missions of nation building. Our military will be used to eliminate real threats as quickly and decisively as possible, and when those threats are defeated, we will withdraw just as quick and decisively.
The warning to those nations who allow such threats to emerge within them, is that America reserves the right to decide how to destroy those threats, and no longer feels any duty to repair anything left behind and broken in the effort. Perhaps over time, such nations will better focus on keeping such mad men from ever gaining hold within their nations again. If that goal becomes reality, then the world might enjoy significantly more true peace, not merely the absence of war.
-- Ken Stallings
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