U.S. forces rehearsed the helicopter raid over and over, hoping to capture the leader of the Islamic State group on the third floor of a residential building in a Syrian town on the Turkish border, where he was holed up with his family.
But before they could reach him, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi detonated a suicide bomb, triggering a large explosion that blew mangled bodies — including his own — out of the building into the streets outside.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who monitored the raid from the White House's Situation Room, called al-Qurayshi's suicide a "final act of desperate cowardice." It echoed the self-detonation of a bomb by his predecessor, IS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during a U.S. raid in 2019 in Syria.