Inside the midnight raid to kill an Isis leader

It began shortly after midnight. Residents of the Syrian town of Atmeh, just across the border from Turkey, were woken by the deafening buzz of helicopters close above them. The aircraft were carrying a team of US commandos who disembarked and surrounded a residential building. Through loudspeakers, the soldiers called in Arabic for the people inside to surrender.

Terrified and alone with her mother and sister, 22-year-old local resident Sima (not her real name) said they moved away from the windows as a precaution.

“We heard a voice from loudspeakers saying the woman and children should get out of the house that was being targeted. But we didn’t know which house was the target,” she told The Independent.

Thousands of miles away, in the White House situation room, the US president, Joe Biden, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and top generals followed the operation closely. The raid to kill the leader of Isis, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, had been months in the planning. Mr Biden had given the final order for the raid on Tuesday.

But just as soon as it began, the world’s most-wanted militant leader carried out the task himself, detonating a bomb that killed himself and his family, according to an account of the raid given by a senior US administration official. The blast threw bodies on to the street below, they added.