photos of his face and whatnot, and that was one of the ways they were able to confirm it. in his case also, they had dna, of course. i ve actually never heard whether they have dna samples on baghdadi. but when you have someone like that, such a high-profile terror leader, like baghdadi or osama bin lauden, the u.s. init tell jensen will usually try to have something on hand if, in fact, they have an opportunity to kill or capture the person, they can verify the identity. now, courtney, baghdadi was obviously a highs target value for the u.s. with a $25 million bounty on his head at one point. how will his death affect the isis organization? reporter: so, i mean, it s definitely one of the questions i ve been asked since all this started unfolding a couple of hours ago. you know, it s not clear that he had a major role in the day-to-day operation. so is this sort of like, you
know, another bin lauden candidly? i keep comparing it to bin lauden because that was the last major terror organization who with a figure head who is so well known, who was so hunted for many years, that the u.s. was able to go on and kill. so it s not clear whether he was involved in the day-to-day ops. it s the case when you have someone like this who is a role model they look up to, thousands of isis fighters the last several years have pledged their loyalty and, you know, fought to the death with this man as the one who is leading them, when someone like that is killed or captured, it obviously has an impact on the organization. it has an impact on the fighters. you know, it s not readily apparent who might fall in behind him to lead the organization. so there may be a number of days or even weeks where there is
to run day to day ops. but beyond that, it s also not clear what kind of role he had. so we re still trying to gather a lot of information here, find out exactly what happened, whether the u.s. is confident that, in fact, he was killed and any more details about exactly how that happened. this was a special operations raid, we know that. what we don t know exactly kind of the flavor of the spec ops who were involved here. there is a task force presence, so it s possible that these are the most elite of the special operators who would be involved in this. but, again, that s one of the questions we re trying to answer here. so, courtney, how will u.s. military officials go about proving it is actually baghdadi? reporter: so, there s usually some sort of dna evidence that they can gather if they have some way of matching his dna. you know, in the case of osama bin lauden, remember, they took photographs and they were able to compare things, his height,
bin lauden pulled off 9/11. that is what put him in the anales of history, certainly in the anales of history, the islamic extremist movement. baghdadi may have done something even grander on scale as a long-term project. he established a state with millions of people in it. he didn t just do that. he called himself a title that in arabic means the leader of all muslims. he was equating himself to one of the early islamic leaders. but that state, perhaps because it got so big, perhaps because it was exporting terrorism around the world to france in particular, attacking the theater and the newspaper charlie, if you remember, when people marched in the streets. we are charlie. he not only established a state that was exporting terrorism around the world.
were only a few places locally that he had access to. he could have either crossed over into iraq. he s iraqi. baghdadi suggests the connection to iraq baghdadi means from baghdad. these are all known. he could have gone there where there are still some isis pockets. he could have gone down to the area right now everyone has been talking about, the so-called oil regions which still has a few isis sympathizers. or to the idlib area, and not surprising at all that he would have been by the turkish border on a pipeline because, just like bin lauden, you want to hide in a place where you don t think they re going to get to you. so if he thought he could escape into turkey and hide out there, if that s in fact what he was doing, that would not have been that would not have been