Daniele Raineri

Probably some of those safe houses are “wild”, meaning placed in the most isolated areas, and some are “urban”, meaning in more populated areas – and their owners are 100% “clean” and bought them many years ago

They remember that a US drone filmed a tall person taking a walk inside a compound in Abbottabad and that was the end for Usama bin Laden

The guys are not improvising. They have, say, twenty (?) safe houses and they rotate from one to the others but probably slower than we think. I’d say those houses have a gate and a garage or high walls, to get off the car without exposing themselves

The three most important deputies of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, Abu Mutaz al Qureshi and Abu Ali al Anbari and al Adnani, were all killed by Americans in their cars. Osama bin Laden, another most wanted, spent years hiding in the same villa and eluded his hunters just staying there

As for the part “he never stays in the same place for more than one day”: probably just a cliché, especially after losing all the ground. As a matter of fact, traveling from point A to point B is the dangerous part, it’s when the leaders are more exposed

So, why not a van full of gunmen five minutes behind just in case? They assume to be under surveillance and if too many vehicles/men move from point A to point B then you have a pattern. And they want to avoid patterns

Baghdadi travels with “a couple of loyalists”? I don’t think so. Three or four males in a car: not convincing, almost red flag. Women and children would be more natural. A family traveling in a car is the most common thing, you see thousands of them on the move in Iraq and Syria

I guess today the three cars keep enough space between them that observing the road from above – for instance the camera of a drone – you don’t see a convoy, you don’t recognize a pattern, you just see a random sequence of traffic

It’s quite important, because the Islamic State chain of command is supposed to react quickly to the elimination/capture of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. If an authorized vehicle is tailing the Lonely Car, they get reliable news in minutes

Another reason. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and his associates in the "lonely car" don’t use phones or other devices. A drone strikes or special forces try to snatch him: the tailing crew arrives minutes later and sees what’s happening or what happened

Then, I’d say another car is tailing five minutes later the “lonely car”, just in case the latter has problems. You don’t want Abu Bakr al Baghdadi stranded on the roadside somewhere in Syria or Iraq

The scout crew arrives first at destination, checks everything is ok and greenlights the “lonely car”. We have to consider Abu Bakr al Baghdadi has internal enemies too and doesn’t trust at all his men

First of all, I think that the supposed “lonely car” of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is – at least – preceded five minutes on the same road by another car, scouting for surprises and concentrations of security forces