we actually heard from a couple of president trump s senior administration officials, including the secretary of defense, mark esper. he came out on several of the sunday shows and talked about more of the details. we know from president trump that the raid included eight helicopters. they flew through russian and turkish air space. he talked about what the u.s. military calls a deconfliction mechanism. the way they deconflict their air space. he also talked a little bit about what happened on the ground there. he very specifically said abu bakr al baghdadi in his last moments, he described him as cowardly, whimpering, screaming, crying. as hans mentioned, he dragged three children down into a hole before he detonated a suicide vest, killing all four of them. we heard from a more measured tone from mark es spper, he spo about al baghdadi s last moments and how they re so confident the terror leader may be killed. that s the report we have on
president s words in describing al baghdadi s final words and regarding the cowardly crying, whimpering in the funeral like a dog stuff, i m reminded that the aftermath of osama bin laden, and there was the gilded lily was used when brennan falsely said that ubl had tried to use a wife as a human shield. i did put that out. and when he said that he was sobbing and stripped of the strength and running down the tunnel, and it seemed like it struck me as, i would like to know more. maybe it is true and maybe they will put out a video that shows that or maybe it is trump exaggerating in the way that he was does. it is not just him, and there is a history of people in the situations like this wanting to
what the president is saying this actually fundamentally curbs isis or defeats it. i m curious, how does the president s account of all the events square with what you re hearing from your sources? one of your colleagues that turkey was only looped in after the raid started. that s right. we ve heard that the decision was made roughly a week ago to do this. we re trying to understand exactly what impact the decision to leave the kurdish wait. question, when you say that this operation was decided a week ago, isn t it our understanding that al baghdadi only got to this safe house 48 hours ago? i mean, how would the decision have been made a week ago? this is a very good question. this is something we re trying to confirm. where was al baghdadi before this? when i say the decision was made, the president gave permission to carry out this operation we believe a week or so ago. it wasn t until after the
brought the world s number one terrorist leader to justice. abu bakr al baghdadi is dead. he died after running into dead end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all of the way. he reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down. he ignited his vest killing himself and three children. but test results gave certain immediate and totally positive identification. it was him. and this is where it happened in northwest syria and close to the border of turkey, and standing by to kick off the coverage we have nbc white house correspondent hans nichols, and foreign correspondent kim kube,
that he was able to use, because in the cover of darkness, u.s. special operations forces dropped out of helicopters and found him and chased him down into the tunnel according to the president and he killed himself, but he met his end. thank you, richard. and a couple of questions about the description of the tunnels under the safehouses, and is that the norm of the safehouses that you know about or have seen in the aftermath, and also the significance of this very tumultuous region of northern syria, and the fact that he had made his way there, what does that signify to you? so, we were told by a kurdish official that the majority if not all of the safehouses that abu bakr al baghdadi had been prepared for in case he needed to fall back to them did have tunnel complexes and some of the tunnels were like the one that president trump described a dead end tunnel and hiding space, and