so let's say the F15s had a special weapon package that was the bunker busters
they could've been using it on a bunker where al baghdadi is hiding in the last towns of the Euphrates Valley, the last major towns ISIS controls in Syria or Iraq
there were USAF jets spotted over Aleppo, so they were either leaving the area or on their way to the area, unclear, just thinking out loud
Where is Baghdadi? Inside the hunt for the elusive ISIS leader, the world’s most wanted man
(published yesterday)
Rumors ran rampant this past week – starting in Syria and spreading across social media in a matter of minutes – that notorious ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may have been seized by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as they ran the brutal insurgency from its final pockets of territorial control.
Only it would prove to be yet another false alarm.
“These reports are baseless, with no evidence,” Kino Gabriel, the SDF spokesperson and General Command of the Syriac Military Council, told Fox News. “He has not been captured.”
An arrest was made, a U.S.-based counter-terrorism analyst said, but it was “someone with the same last name.”
Baghdadi – whose real name is Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri – remains the world’s most wanted man, with the United States continuing to offer up to $25 million for information leading to his location. He is widely believed to be alive, and still very much in the sights of U.S., SDF and Iraq elite forces
Basri said the most recent assessment this year had Baghdadi specifically pinned to the eastern Syrian border towns, mostly moving between the Syrian places of Hajin and Dashisha in Al Hasaka. It is believed that the shadowy ruler has long donned different “disguises,” most often sporting non-traditional, regular clothing to stay under-the-radar.
Multiple sources told Fox News that he maneuvers without convoys or any attention-drawing security figures, and is instead only flanked by a couple of trusted loyalists – and neither he nor his associates have mobile phones or detectable devices.
“We think Baghdadi is in the Syrian desert at-large,” Fadhel Abu Rageef, a Baghdad-based political and security analyst, said. “Wearing modern clothes, no mobiles, a simple car, and just a driver. Anyone around him is dressed in modern clothes.”
He believes the shadowy leader is in the remaining Syrian ISIS bastion but said he had no evidence of him having crossed into Iraq since the summer of 2017 as the “caliphate” there was crumbling. ISIS has been reduced to just two small villages in Syria’s border region with Iraq, with U.S. officials assessing that it all should be cleared “within weeks.”
A spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve, the name given the U.S.-led mission to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told Fox News they “have seen no indications of him or his whereabouts at this time.”
And while multiple sources inside the US intelligence and defense communities told Fox News that the issue of Baghdadi’s whereabouts has gone quiet in recent months, the push to find him has not fallen by the wayside.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/where-is-baghdadi-inside-the-hunt-for-the-elusive-isis-leader-the-worlds-most-wanted-man