Renewed push to track down and take out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Obama administration steps up focus on ISIS leader
The world’s most wanted man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, avoided capture by Iraqi special forces “by minutes” after escaping through a trapdoor, it has been revealed.
The ISIS leader, who has a $33 million bounty on his head, narrowly escaped being captured by the Iraqis in 2013, according to a new documentary.
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Al-Baghdadi is said to have abandoned his fighters and gone into hiding as Iraqi forces continued to make inroads into Mosul, the caliphate the declared in the city’s central mosque in 2014.
ISIS captured large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria and al-Baghdadi’s sick ideology has inspired a number of attacks upon the western world.
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But things could have been very different if he was nabbed in a special forces raid four years ago, according to the documentary Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: The Footsteps Of The Most Wanted Man In The World, The Mirror reports.
According to the documentary, made by Sofia Amara, troops from Iraq’s elite Falcon Brigade missed out on capturing the terror leader by just minutes during a raid on his safe house in Baghdad in 2013.
Much like Saddam Hussein before he was captured, al-Baghdadi was hiding out in a basement bolthole, hidden by an entrance that was disguised in a tiled floor.
By the time the soldiers discovered the hidden chamber, al-Baghdadi had escaped through the trapdoor which led to a passage under his house.
However he left behind an assortment of weapons, documents and ISIS propaganda.
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