Rukmini CallimachiVerified account

2. Back in the summer, two people were arrested that led the CIA to flesh out the terror chieftain’s location: His courier & one of his wives. They provided details that combined with other intel allowed the CIA to hone in on a compound in Idlib - but it was too dangerous to go.

3. The compound where he was included civilians & being in Idlib, it was in both Syrian and Russian airspace. One source told me then that they had info he was going to move, and they planned to take him out during the move. But he didn’t move. For weeks, then months, he stayed.

4. Had he been tipped off that something was afoot? Did he find it odd that his trusted courier and one of his wives had gone silent? It’s unclear. But we know that geopolitically everything changed this month, when a presidential phone call led to Turkey’s invasion of Syria

5. Sources we’ve spoken to indicate that the mission had to be rushed, because America was losing its visibility due to the pullout of US forces. Many are surprised Baghdadi was hiding in Idlib. But there were data points leading up to the raid indicating an ISIS presence there.

7. In 2015, I began collecting interviews with people who had directly interacted with Baghdadi to build a portrait of the terror chief. In all, I’ve spoken to 17 people who knew him, including his teachers, his childhood friends, his aides & three of the Yazidi girls he raped.

9. What I’ve learned on this beat is that there’s a lot of stuff that gets repeated as fact without anyone trying to verify it, and over time it becomes the truth. Here are the surprising things I learned about Baghdadi when I took the time to go down the dirt tracks of his life

11. The owner of the mosque talked about how Baghdadi as a boy would - unprompted - lead the other boys in cleaning the mosque, hauling the carpets outside, hosing them down and drying them in the sun. This was his pastime while other kids hung out and did wheelies on their bikes

12. This was one of numerous anecdotes I collected from people at his first and at his second mosque, who surprised me with the affection they spoke of Baghdadi. They described him as devoted to the religion & also as a talented reciter of scripture. By the time he was a teen...

13. .... worshippers at the Samarra mosque that Baghdadi attended began asking the mosque owner to have Baghdadi - and only Baghdadi - recite the scripture during Friday prayer, essentially replacing the imam. “His voice was like a bird,” said one former attendee.