Hajji Abdullah is the latest jihadi leader eliminated in a U.S. raid, but the President still faces challenges in Russia, China, and Iran, as well as the pandemic. 

By Robin Wright @ Daily Comment @ NewYorker.com, Feb. 3

The elusive leader of isis blew up himself, his wife, and their children during a risky predawn raid by helicopter-borne U.S. Special Operations Forces in northwest Syria on Thursday. The attack on the leader of what remains the world’s most dangerous terrorist movement, which was carried out after months of secret planning, led to the death of the third major jihadi leader in a confrontation with U.S. forces in the past decade or so. President Joe Biden said the operation that killed Hajji Abdullah, also known as Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, was “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide anywhere in the world.” President Barack Obama oversaw the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his hideaway in Pakistan, in 2011. President Donald Trump approved plans that led to the death of the isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, in 2019. isis is estimated to have as many as twenty thousand jihadis in underground cells still proliferating across the globe, decades after the emergence of jihadism in the nineteen-seventies.

For Biden, the complex raid coincided with his efforts to broker an end to the escalating confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, an ambitious China, fraught negotiations on Iran’s nuclear deal, and a global pandemic. Administration officials said that Biden had been holding lengthy undisclosed briefings on the secret plan to kill or capture Abdullah. The timing is in some ways a political boon to Biden, despite claims by Administration officials that the raid was not meant to send a message to any other nation. Yet Biden’s deep engagement in the process and his order on Tuesday for the strike to begin indicated that—at seventy-nine—he can multitask international crises.

The raid was a coup in the now decades-long campaign to contain, curtail, or eliminate jihadi militants. Abdullah, who met Baghdadi during a stint in the U.S.-run Camp Bucca prison, in 2004, had overseen the spread of isis factions around the world. Despite the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate in 2019, isis cells still carried out attacks from West Africa to southeast Asia, including a major operation that killed Americans at Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, last August. The isis leader had also been the driving force behind the most brutal isis tactics [....]