US Calls Death of Islamic State Leader 'Significant Blow'

washington — 

Top U.S. officials are hopeful that a risky nighttime raid, months in the making, will deal one of the world’s most resilient terror groups a long-lasting setback and blunt its efforts to strike at the United States and its Western allies.

U.S. President Joe Biden announced the death of reclusive Islamic State leader Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla early Thursday, hours after U.S. special forces left his hideout and his body in northwest Syria’s Idlib province.

Al-Mawla “oversaw the spread of ISIS-affiliated terrorist groups around the world,” Biden told reporters gathered at the White House, using an acronym for the terror group, which is also called IS or Daesh.

“After savaging communities and murdering innocents, [al-Mawla] was responsible for the recent brutal attack on a prison in northeast Syria holding ISIS fighters,” the president said. “This operation is testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide. … We will come after you and find you.”

Al-Mawla

Al-Mawla, known by multiple aliases, including Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi and Hajji ‘Abdallah, was born in Iraq in 1976 and became a religious scholar who rose through the terror group’s ranks, becoming a top aide to former IS leader and self-declared caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

By the time Baghdadi died in a U.S. raid on his hideout in northwestern Syria in October 2019, al-Mawla had become the heir apparent, having overseen IS’s slaughter of the Yazidi religious minority and some of the terror group’s global operations.

As leader, al-Mawla was even more reclusive than Baghdadi, who made occasional speeches to rally supporters, leading some analysts to wonder how much control he retained as IS affiliates outside Syria and Iraq gained in power and prominence.

U.S. officials, however, said al-Mawla was finding ways to be effective in building and expanding the bureaucracy that underpinned the terror group’s networks.

“While Baghdadi was iconic and a philosopher figure in ISIS, this guy was actually far more of an operational planner and a director of operations,” General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, told a virtual conference late Thursday.

Disrupting IS operations

Al-Mawla “was every bit as evil and every bit as committed to attacks on the United States and our partners,” McKenzie said, adding that al-Mawla’s death could see IS leaders in Syria and Iraq cede power to regional affiliates.

But the affiliates could also suffer with al-Mawla out of the way.

“When you don’t have a central core that can disperse money and share money among competing franchises, it makes it harder for them to be resourced,” McKenzie said. “I think it’s going to be a significant blow.”

U.S. officials are also hoping the way in which al-Mawla died will further demoralize the terror group and its force of 8,000 to 16,000 fighters spread across Syria and Iraq.

“In a final act of cowardice and disregard for human life, [al-Mawla] detonated a blast, a significant blast, killing himself and several others, including his wife and children,” a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. operation told reporters.

“The blast was so large on the third floor that it blew bodies outside of the house and into the surrounding areas,” the official added.

The raid

U.S. defense officials said al-Mawla set off the explosion shortly after U.S. forces arrived at his hideout, a nondescript building in a residential section of Atmeh, a town in Syria’s Idlib province, not far from the border with Turkey.

Using a megaphone, the U.S. forces asked for al-Mawla and one of his senior deputies to allow noncombatants to leave, and to give themselves up.

Officials said a family of six living on the first floor got out, with the explosion shaking the building not long after.

“Let me be very clear, [al-Mawla] did not fight,” McKenzie said. “He killed himself and his immediate family without fighting, even as we attempted to call for his surrender and offered him a path to survive.”

Al-Mawla’s deputy and his wife then barricaded themselves on the second floor, dying after engaging in a firefight with U.S. forces.

One child on the second floor was also killed, though four others were rescued by U.S. troops.

Children among the dead

Initial reports from groups such as the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 13 people had been killed, including three women and four children.

Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization, said late Thursday that at least six children had been killed, calling the deaths “deeply alarming and unacceptable.”

U.S. officials insisted they had taken all possible precautions, blaming the deaths on the IS leader himself.

“We had a good sense of who was in the building … and had taken numerous safeguards throughout the rehearsals and planning to protect those individuals,” a second senior administration official said.

He added that military planners even opted for a raid, with U.S. forces scheduled to be on the ground for two hours, instead of an airstrike, to minimize harm to noncombatants.

Complications

U.S. military officials said despite the success of the initial operation, there were some complications.

One of the helicopters used to get troops to al-Mawla’s hideout experienced mechanical difficulties and had to be abandoned and destroyed shortly after leaving the site.

U.S. forces also briefly came under attack from fighters with the al-Qaida-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, killing two of them in the ensuing firefight.

The presence of al-Qaida-linked fighters, however, was not unexpected given that northwestern Syria doubles as a hub for al-Qaida, IS’s main rival, and, according to U.N. member state intelligence agencies, “a strategic location for [IS] fighters and family members, in particular as a gateway to Turkey.”

US partners

The U.S. operation quickly earned praise from key partners, including the coalition-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

“This is a strategic gain,” SDF spokesman Farhad Shami told VOA on Thursday, calling al-Mawla’s death “significant.”

SDF officials, still feeling the sting of the nearly weeklong IS attack and uprising at al-Sina’a prison in Hasaka, have warned the incident was part of a larger plot by the terror group to take and hold territory.

They have also said that much of the planning for the attack, which killed more than 100 soldiers, guards and prison staff, had come from IS leaders, including al-Mawla, something U.S. officials confirmed Thursday.

“We consider this operation of eliminating [the] ISIS leader as revenge for their attack on Hasaka,” Shami told VOA, adding that SDF forces had provided resources and intelligence to the U.S. forces who carried out the raid.

Iraqi officials Thursday also celebrated al-Mawla’s demise and tweeted that Iraqi intelligence had contributed information leading to his location.

IS reaction

IS followers have also started to react to al-Mawla’s death, though initial posts on social media platforms reflected a strong sense of disbelief.

“What is the truth in the news of the Caliph’s martyrdom?” one supporter wrote in a post captured by Jihadoscope, a company that monitors online activity by Islamist extremists.

“Impure media are spreading rumors everywhere,” the follower added.

Another decried the initial report as “fake news,” accusing the U.S. of fabricating events to boost its own morale.

But Jihadoscope co-founder Raphael Gluck told VOA that as the hours passed, more IS followers began to accept that al-Mawla had indeed been killed and began focusing their anger at the U.S. and al-Qaida, accusing the terror group’s affiliates of collaboration.

What’s next for IS

U.S. officials say they are watching closely, with IS expected to name a successor. But those plans may have been complicated by recent developments in Iraq.

In October, Iraqi forces arrested Sami Jasim Muhammad al-Jaburi, also known as Hajji Hamid, described by the Pentagon as “one of ISIS’s most senior leaders.”

One Western counterterrorism official, speaking to VOA on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, called al-Jaburi’s arrest “very significant” as al-Jaburi was seen as a candidate to potentially replace al-Mawla should he be killed or captured.

Mutlu Civiroglu contributed to this report.

Significant Nonimmigrant Visa Fee Increase Expected by September

The Biden administration has proposed raising the fees on almost all nonimmigrant visas. While U.S. officials say the move is needed to better align visa prices with what it costs to provide them, critics worry that if the administration does not address visa wait times, the cost increase could mean even fewer travelers and students coming to the United States.

According to a Federal Register notice, the State Department expects the new prices to go into effect by September, and it is accepting comments on the proposed increases until February 28.

“All of the fee increases are happening at a time when tourism and travel to the United States is already at an all-time low, and the State Department is imposing waits of six months to a year in many places for a tourist- or business-travel visa,” David Bier, an immigration policy expert at the Cato Institute, told VOA.

State Department figures show the visas with the highest numbers of applications are tourism, business, and study.

A nonimmigrant visa allows the holder to travel as a tourist or live, work or study temporarily in the U.S. under certain conditions. Visa applications for tourism, B1 and B2, and student visas, F, M, J, will increase from $160 to $245, a 54% increase. While employment-based visas, H, L, O, P, Q and R, are going from $190 to $310, a 63% increase.

Proposed Prices for Popular US Visas

“The most important thing is whether visas are issued promptly. If the administration increases costs, but there’s not a vast improvement in service from the State Department, then the result will be far fewer travelers,” Bier added.

U.S. airport traffic has fallen in recent years, counting both domestic and international travelers. According to the Transportation Security Administration, it screened a total of 1.1 million people on January 26. On the same date in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, that number was more than 2 million.

Promises

Addressing America’s immigration system was one of President Joe Biden’s key campaign promises. On his first day in office, he unveiled the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, sweeping immigration reform legislation that included an eight-year path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., a plan to clear employment-based visa backlogs, and a plan to prevent dependents of employment-based visa holders from “aging out” of the system, among other changes.

But the legislation stalled in Congress and is largely viewed as all but dead.

“Immigrants have done so much for America during the pandemic — as they have throughout our history. The country supports immigration reform. Congress should act,” Biden said.

Immigration experts say that while Biden reversed many of his predecessor’s policies often described as anti-immigration, a Trump administration executive order that limited legal immigration and the issuance of temporary work visas contributed to longer wait times for nonimmigrant visas.

Also, the State Department temporarily suspended routine visa services at all U.S. embassies and consulates in 2020 because of COVID-19 restrictions. They are reopening under a phased resumption of visa services, but about a fourth are partly or fully closed, according to the Cato Institute.

U.S. consulates around the world are a major component of the immigration system, processing visas “that authorize travel to the United States, but many consulates remain closed, and the open ones are reporting record wait times — [more than one year] in dozens of locations,” Bier wrote in a recent analysis.

A State Department official told VOA that U.S. embassies and consulates have online information on operating status and which services are currently offered.

According to Bier, in January most consulates reported waits of 202 days for a visa appointment for business travelers and tourists, up from 95 days in April 2021. For students and exchange visitors, the wait was about 38 days, up from 25 days about a year ago, and 62 days for everyone else, including skilled temporary workers, up from 40 days in April 2021.

FILE – Students make their way through the University of Chicago campus, in Chicago, May 6, 2021.

Effect on students, workers

A State spokesperson explained that the department’s consular operations are largely funded by fees for services and the proposed fee increase is to ensure the agency is fully recovering the costs of providing these services.

“Visa fees charged by the Department are generally based on the cost of providing visa services and are determined after conducting a study of the cost of such service,” the spokesperson told VOA by email. “The assessment of the actual cost of service in combination with demand projections over many years determined the fees published in the proposed fee schedule.”

Increased fees need to translate into better service, especially shorter wait times, which is particularly important for students, said Jill Welch, senior policy adviser to the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

“We’re still evaluating the potential impact of the proposed rule on international student flows to the United States. … It’s important for [the State Department] to have adequate resources to process visa applications, particularly for those students and scholars who are on tight timelines for obtaining their visas in order to arrive on time for the academic term,” Welch said.

International students at U.S. colleges and universities contributed nearly $41 billion to the U.S. economy and supported 458,290 jobs in the 2018-19 academic year, according to a study by NAFSA: Association of International Educators. In the 2020-21 academic year, international students contributed $28.4 billion to the U.S. economy, a decline of nearly 27%, or $10.3 billion, largely because of the pandemic.

But not everyone believes higher visa costs will have a big impact.

Marcelo Barros, an international student career expert in Washington, told VOA that although the fee increase was “unfortunate,” it wouldn’t stop people from coming to the U.S.

“This is not going to have any meaningful impact on [student] enrollment or on [employment-based visas]. This will not have any meaningful impact on the desire of companies to hire talent outside the U.S.,” he said, adding that if travelers, students or high-skill workers want to come to the United States, they will pay the new fee.