'Trump can claim victory for the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,' writes Peter Bergen for CNNOpinion. 'He, largely continuing on the foreign policy path that Obama laid out, helped eliminate a major US national security threat.'
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book,"Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos," will be published in December. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
President Donald Trump can certainly take a victory lap for the operation that killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Prior to his death, Baghdadi had declared ISIS a"caliphate," as his terrorist army stormed across Syria and Iraq, seizing territory the size of Portugal and ruling over some 8 million subjects.
At Trump's Sunday news conference, he said the ISIS leader was also personally responsible for the death of American aid worker Kayla Mueller. This appears to be the first official US acknowledgment of Baghdadi's role in her death, as ISIS had claimed that she had died in a Jordanian airstrike in 2015. White House national security adviser Robert O'Brien told NBC the operation that killed Baghdadi was named after Mueller. 'use strict';CNN.Videx=CNN.Videx || {};CNN.Videx.
What we know about ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi 04:09Not surprisingly, many are praising Trump's success. Gen. Joseph Votel, who led the war against ISIS for three years under Presidents Barack Obama and Trump, and retired in March, emailed me to say,"By any measure this was an important milestone -- not just for the campaign but for everyone who was victimized by ISIS under Baghdadi's leadership.
Esper details 'flawless' al-Baghdadi raid 11:41But the campaign to eradicate ISIS began two and a half years before Trump assumed office, when Obama ordered ISIS positions to be bombed during the late summer of 2014. The operation to take back Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq where ISIS had first declared its caliphate, began in October 2016 while Obama was still in office.
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