The death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last weekend set spy services to public bragging: CIA officials told The New York Times that the discovery of the ISIS leader’s location came after the arrest and interrogation of one of his wives and a courier this summer. Kurdish leaders, who said back in April that Baghdadi was in Idlib, told The Washington Post they had provided intelligence for the operation. Iraq’s national intelligence service also boasted of giving Baghdadi’s location to the Americans after “constant monitoring and the formation of a specialised task force over an entire year.”

But the Turkish National Intelligence Office (MIT)—the country’s closest equivalent to the CIA—isn’t among those taking credit for tracking down Baghdadi, who was killed Saturday in a U.S. Special Forces raid in northern Syria. This, despite the fact that Baghdadi was living just three and a half miles from the Turkish border, in an area controlled by the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army. Baghdadi’s death thus exposes an enduring and under-appreciated reality of geopolitics in the Middle East: The Islamic State has always had a peculiar—which is to say, not exclusively hostile—relationship with Turkey.

The MIT was not always so reticent: In the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul embassy last year, MIT chief Hakan Fidan shared audio intelligence of the killing with Turkish press and foreign intelligence services. But after Baghdadi’s death, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan instead drew the same moral equivalence he’s been offering for years, equating ISIS with the Kurdish forces who had partnered with the U.S. against ISIS until Trump’s sudden pullout. On Turkey’s role in the Baghdadi operation, Erdogan’s spokesman would only say that “the night when the operation was conducted ... there was intense diplomacy between our military authorities” and the incoming American forces. Turkey’s Defense Ministry gave the U.S. operation faint praise, calling it “within the spirit of alliance and strategic partnership” in the fight against terror.



The spirit of that alliance is mutual suspicion: The U.S. military, fearful that info on its move against Baghdadi would leak, only told Turkish officials that an operation was planned in Turkish-held territory, but did not identify the target, one American official told Foreign Policy. “Turkey did not provide any assistance in this operation, and he was located right next to their border,” the official said. “That shows you how little they do on countering ISIS.”

Baghdadi’s location “surprised his American pursuers,” the Times reported, “because it was deep inside a part of northwestern Syria controlled by archrival Qaeda groups.” Like Osama bin Laden, who took refuge in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the mid-2000s, Baghdadi was living under the nose of his ostensible enemies. Just as reporting once connected bin Laden’s hideout and the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, suspicions are running strong that Baghdadi enjoyed some tacit Turkish protection.