The officials told the Associated Press that more people may have died when ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi detonated a suicide bomb as the raid unfolded. However, the officials said they could not be certain al-Qurayshi personally set off the bomb that killed him, his wife and two children.
The ISIS leader is believed to have detonated the bomb on the third floor of a house soon after U.S. forces arrived at the building via helicopter. Forces then entered the house and killed an ISIS fighter and his wife in a shootout on the second floor. Up to five children had been on the floor alongside the couple. One child was found dead, believed to have been killed by the “concussive effects” of the explosion.
Officials said the plan had originally been to capture al-Qurayshi alive and transport him to be temporarily detained in an unnamed third country. Although there had reportedly not been any plans for long-term U.S. detention, the officials declined to provide any additional details of the original plan, citing sensitive “government-to-government” discussions.
The Pentagon has officially acknowledged just seven deaths in the raid, including three ISIS fighters and four civilians, but rescue workers have said that at least 13 civilians including women and children were killed in the raid, according to The New York Times. First responders reportedly said that the civilians killed included six children, four women and three men.
During a White House briefing last week, President Joe Biden commended the military for having “successfully removed a major terrorist threat to the world” by killing al-Qurayshi, calling him, “the driving force behind the genocide of the Yazidi people in northwestern Iraq in 2014.”
Biden said that the Special Forces raid was executed after he directed the Pentagon “to take every precaution possible to minimize civilian casualties.”
Department of Defense Press Secretary John Kirby praised U.S. Special Forces for a “successful” mission that included “protecting more than 10 women, children and babies” during a press conference one day after the operation.
The military evacuated one man, one woman and eight children from the building during the February 2 raid. There were no U.S. casualties.
Aliaa Ali, third secretary of the Syrian permanent mission to the United Nations, condemned the raid as a “flagrant violation of Syria’s sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity” in comments to Newsweek.
“The claim of ’eliminating ISIS’ for several years now, without being actually eliminated proves that the U.S. uses the pretext of ‘combating terrorism’ in order to achieve its hostile agendas against Syria,” said Ali.
“Describing a mission that resulted in 13 civilian casualties, including women and children, as successful makes us wonder how many lives would have been lost if the mission failed,” she added.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment.