Despite what Donald Trump says, terrorist's death no last hurrah

I’m talking about how the jihadi leader’s underpants were stolen by an undercover source and DNA-tested to prove his identity before the operation by American Special Forces to kill him.

That the underpants are reported to have been swiped after Syrian Kurds managed to place a spy in al-Baghdadi’s inner circle, is not only a bizarre twist in the story of his final days, but testimony to the reliance US intelligence has on what until recently were their Kurdish allies in north eastern Syria.

Not that you would think this of course after listening to US President Donald Trump’s predictably risible grandstanding in the wake of the US raid.

Hearing Trump’s speech you would have thought that he himself, though never having heard a bullet fired in anger, led the nighttime Delta Force commando assault.

In fact, as a number of observers have pointed out it speaks volumes about Washington’s shambolic policy in Syria right now that the raid’s success happened largely in spite of not because of Trump’s role.

US Central Commander Kenneth Mckenzie said the IS leader had long been a target for US forces.

READ MORE: US prepared for possible revenge attacks after raid on IS leader al-Baghdadi

For some time now the US President has never missed an opportunity to attack or undermine the three crucial factors that led to al-Baghdadi’s demise. As the New York Times security correspondent, David E Sanger recently observed, the al Baghdadi raid was an operation built on three things Trump regularly derides: the projection of US military power, faith in intelligence and last but far from least robust alliances with those allies on the ground.

With regards to the first of these, by withdrawing US troops from north-eastern Syria, Trump has at one and the same time diminished US military leverage, leaving Turkey, Russia, Iran and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with a free hand in the region.

Then there is Trump’s by now well-known disdain for the US intelligence community and the CIA in particular. Finally, there is the US leader’s propensity to dump allies usually because in Trump’s opinion they are surplus to requirement according to the puerile vagaries of what he thinks of as “diplomacy”.

In other words, without these three factors working simultaneously and effectively al-Baghdadi would most likely still be at large.

It was retired US general and former director of the CIA David Petraeus, who earlier this year observed that in strategic terms “ungoverned space becomes extremist space.” Interesting to note then that it was Idlib in north-western Syria, where myriad Islamist groups hold sway, that al-Baghdadi was finally located.

He was holed up in the house of Abu Mohammed Salama, a commander of Hurras al-Din, a jihadist group considered loyal to al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri who are rivals of IS. Despite this rivalry, Hurras al-Din members are believed to have helped other senior IS group members flee from their last pockets of control in eastern Syria to Idlib earlier this year.

Yet again this is another reminder of the fluid nature and unlikely alliances that spring up between Islamist extremist groups in the “ungoverned spaces” that former CIA chief David Petraeus spoke of.

Right now as chaos reigns in so many parts of the region, the chance for IS to capitalise on this has grown even without their self-styled ‘emir’ al-Baghdadi. That Trump clearly chooses to ignore the advice of those within the intelligence community about the conditions on the ground that makes this ripe is worrying.

It’s estimated that IS still has as many as 18,000 fighters in the Middle East. Many are in sleeper cells or operating semi-autonomously and a fragmentation or de-centralisation of IS may only turn out to be bad news instead of good after al-Baghdadi’s death.

The uppermost question is whether Washington will retain the capacity to strike at terrorists thousands of miles away, given the recent shifts in deployments and alliances, Trump is hell-bent in undertaking.

“I hope they all do great, we are 7000 miles away!” Trump recently tweeted dismissively about Syria, but as history has shown, the transnational capacity of Islamist inspired terrorism is all too real and is no respecter of distance.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, itself chaotic events on the ground across the region could not be more conducive to an IS resurgence. Even before al-Baghdadi’s death, IS had been rebuilding its networks in northern Iraq.

No doubt during his last few days among the living al-Baghdadi would have derived some comfort from the turbulent events currently gripping his homeland of Iraq which violent protest analysts say have the potential to tip the country once again into the abyss of civil war.

For IS’s cadres, such a developing crisis will give them something to cling to as they mourn al-Baghdadi’s death.

Make no mistake about it Iraq is on the edge. This is the severest crisis of Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi’s year-long tenure and unless he can mollify the protesters, he may not yet survive in office.

In the real world, as opposed to Trump’s dreamland, this is precisely the kind of instability IS revels in and which allowed it to grow in the past.

Trump need only to cast his mind back to 2014 when in the spring and summer of that year IS stormed the western and northern provinces of Iraq taking city after city while the state fell apart.

Trump might want to do a Pontius Pilate and wash his hands of the region, but realpolitik rarely allows such easy solutions.

Stealing al-Baghdadi’s underpants might have been a necessary part of verifying his DNA and identity, but collectively IS’s DNA is as easily identifiable as it has always been.

Al-Baghdadi’s death is no last hurrah in confronting the threat of IS whatever Trump says.

Perhaps most worrying of all though, rarely can America have been at such a disadvantage in containing that threat because of Trump’s current blundering.