This is what - the fifth time we've been told he's been killed? This guy is like a cat...
As I understand it, there were tech specialists as part of the Special Forces team who had equipment that enabled them to do a DNA test in the field, and they had a sample of al-Baghdadi's DNA to work with. Even though there were mutilated remains, they would still be able to identify his remains based on DNA. It's a grisly job because you don't know what body part belongs to who, but that's how victims are identified.The children would have shared half of his DNA, but the techs would be looking for a much closer match than that. There was also visual confirmation that it was him. Based on what we know so far, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that they actually got him this time.
I also have questions about this whole thing. Trump provided an unnecessarily graphic description of what happened, and there's reason to believe he made it up like he usually does. When Secretary of Defense Esper was asked about Trump's claim that al-Baghdadi was "whimpering and crying", he simply said that he had no information about that.
We're told that the raid happened at 3:30 PM ET; if that's the case, Trump wasn't in the Situation Room to watch it as it happened. The press pool that covers him daily reported that he was playing golf and didn't leave the resort until 3:31pm, getting back to DC some time after 4 PM. There was an obviously staged photo released of Trump and his National Security team allegedly watching the raid as it happened; here's the problem with it - the computers on the table weren't plugged into anything, everyone in the photo was looking at the photographer instead of at a screen, and the timestamp in the photo's metadata shows that it was taken at 5:07 PM. So either the time of the raid we were given was inaccurate, or Trump was just being Trump and making it up as he went. |
