I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday story. On October 27th, 2019, America woke up to the news

that the leader of ISIS was dead. Then President Donald Trump told Americans the operation had been

a big success. Last night, the United States brought the world's number one terrorist leader to justice.

Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi is dead. But NPR's Daniel Estren has a different story about that raid, a story

that challenges parts of the official US narrative. For the last four years, he's been looking

into the story of two men who were killed and another who was seriously wounded that night.

It's a story about the human cost of American military operations and whether our government

is telling us the truth. Daniel, you're joining us right now. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me, Aisha. So, I want to start with how did you get involved in this

story? I mean, I was covering it at the White House from the White House side, but you were kind

of on the ground. Yeah, it was a Sunday morning. I was in Lebanon, so across the border from Syria,

where I woke up. I was tired from a late night of reporting the night before. I looked at my phone

and I saw the huge news. So, my producer and I got straight to work and we were reporting about,

you know, why this was so significant. Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi had of course declared an Islamic

caliphate, took over parts of Iraq and Syria. He recruited fighters from around the world.

But at that time, we were calling our Syrian sources to just try to understand like how did

this operation actually unfold on the ground? And that very morning, one of our sources told us that

two of his own relatives were killed by US troops in that operation, Khaled Mustafa Qormo

and Khaled Abdul Majid Qormo. And he said they were non-combatants, which contradicted everything

that we had heard from US officials until that point. This raid was impeccable. Our forces isolated

the compound and protected all the non-combatants. So, you were hearing something that is very different

than what is being said from the bully pulpit of the White House and the Defense Department.

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