Donald Trump Says He Might Release Video Of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Death
As The Inquisitr reported, the Islamic State leader was killed in a United States military raid Sunday by special-ops forces. He was reportedly cornered in a tunnel with three of his children, who died with him after he detonated a suicide vest.
While speaking to reporters Monday, Donald Trump said that video footage of Baghdadi’s death might be released, Newsweek reports.
“We’re thinking about it. We may. The question was: Am I considering releasing video footage of the raid? And we may take certain parts of it and release it, yes,” he said.
Trump said Sunday that he watched the mission from the White House’s situation room, describing it “as though you were watching a movie.”
“And, frankly, I think it’s something that should be brought out so that his followers and all of these young kids that want to leave various countries, including the United States, they should see how he died.”
Trump reportedly left House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff in the dark about the operation that took out Baghdadi, suggesting that he feared they would leak the information. But during a news conference where he described his distrust of Pelosi, Schiff, and Washington as a whole, Trump allegedly leaked sensitive information typically kept within expert officials.
Pelosi attacked Trump’s decision to leave her and Schiff out of the loop, claiming that the House should be aware of all the administration’s operations in the region. Schiff highlighted that Congress should have been aware of the risks should something had gone wrong to allow it to provide appropriate feedback.
The White House releases an image it says was taken in the Situation Room yesterday during the operation to capture or kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi pic.twitter.com/ZVpj06hWgv
— Rohit Kachroo (@RohitKachrooITV) October 27, 2019
While speaking to CNN, former Obama administration national security official Samantha Vinograd expressed surprise at how much information Trump was revealing about the operation, Politico reported.
“This is obviously a major accomplishment, but from a counterterrorism perspective, the president’s engagement with the media on this is pretty surprising to me,” she said, adding that the level of detail is “unprecedented.”
Although Trump took criticism for the language he used to describe the successful operation, his supporters were quick to hit back and suggest that such critics are focusing on the style of his comments rather than the substance.
The news of the Baghdadi’s death was met with skepticism from Russia’s Defense Ministry, which suggested that it did not have access to any reliable information about the operation. Regardless, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later said that if the death was true, it would be a significant step in the fight against international terrorism.
