the region. natalie? all right, we ll be waiting to hear about it in a few hours from president trump. let s turn now to our ben wedeman. he is live for us in beirut. let s talk more about al baghdadi and who he was as far as the leader of isis. was he highly regarded? what did people think of him? reporter: well, he was significant in the sense that he was a descendant of the prophet mohammad. he was a man who oversaw the birth of the so-called islamic state. and he stood at the very pinnacle of the pyramid of power within the area controlled by isis at its peak, of course, was the size of great britain, but what was significant about al baghdadi is he only had one personal public appearance, and that was in july of 2014, in the
who became famous in the 1980s when he led the so-called arab mujahideen and was in the headlines from then until his death in pakistan in 2011. so, abu bakr al baghdadi s death is significant, but, as i ve said before, isis still operates according to the inspector general of the pentagon in, by the thousands, thousands of fighters in syria, in iraq. they re also present in the sinai peninsula of egypt, in libya, in west africa, in afghanistan, in the philippines. they will not be disappearing just because the leader of the islamic state is now dead. natalie? right, hopefully this will be an initial blow to those still working under isis and the flag.
dominated by al qaeda groups. elements of what was known as the al nusra front remain there in some force. they really are the dominant force there, natalie. it s also incredibly densely populated with hundreds of thousands of internal refugees who fled aleppo and other areas as a result of the russian and assad regime s bombardment, which in idlib has been continuing on an almost daily basis. so a highly complex battlefield environment. so then insert an american force. highly complex also in terms of the intelligence. now, it s conceivable, really, that the intelligence that led to al baghdadi must have come from people on the ground as much from signals intelligence, because he was actually in an area surrounded by unfriendly forces. al qaeda and the so-called islamic state split from each