October 26th, 2019, northern Syria. 70 Delta Force operators dropped into the most dangerous patch of ground on Earth, hunted the world’s most wanted man into a tunnel, and came back without losing a single man. The British SAS, the unit that literally invented modern special operations, watched what happened that night and called them something they had never called anyone before.
So, what exactly did Delta Force do in that tunnel that made the most of beat sold.i.ers on the planet stop and say, “These men are on a different level entirely.” The sun had been down for hours, and the desert was cold and black and completely still. Eight helicopters moved through the darkness without lights, flying so low that the pilots could feel the ground beneath them more than they could see it.
Inside those helicopters, packed shoulder-to-shoulder in full kit, sat roughly 70 men from the most secretive military unit the United States had ever built. They did not speak. They checked their weapons. They breathed. Some of them had been hunting the man they were about to find for four straight years.
His name was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and tonight he was going to run out of places to hide. This is the story of how a secret American unit did something so extreme, so relentless, and so effective in the years leading up to that night that the British SAS, the oldest and most respected special forces unit on Earth, ran out of normal words to describe them.
What those British operators said, and why they said it, is exactly what this video is about. You are going to get every bit of it. But to understand what happened in that tunnel on that October night, you first have to understand what the world looked like years earlier when finding al-Baghdadi felt almost impossible. By the middle of 2015, the Islamic State controlled a piece of land roughly the size of the United Kingdom.
Not a jungle, not a mountain range, a functioning territory with roads, borders, courts, prisons, and oil fields. 8 million people lived inside it. The organization was pulling in close to a billion dollars a year through oil sales, taxes, theft, and ransom payments. They had their own currency. They had their own passport.
Al-Baghdadi had declared himself the caliph of a new Islamic empire, and men were traveling from Europe, America, and Australia to fight for him. The CIA was watching. The NSA was listening. The British SAS had dedicated full squadrons to the hunt. The most sophisticated surveillance and intelligence network in human history was pointed directly at one man, and that man was still alive.
And here is what made it worse. Every tool the world’s most powerful nations had for finding a person had already been used. And none of it had worked. Every conventional tool had been tried. Signals intelligence meant tracking phones, and Al-Baghdadi did not use phones. Pattern of life analysis meant watching a target move through their routine until a pattern emerged, and Al-Baghdadi had no routine.
He moved constantly, always between a small set of people he had known for decades, always through couriers, never through technology that could be intercepted. Drone surveillance required knowing roughly where someone was before you could find them precisely. And Al-Baghdadi had made sure that no one knew roughly where he was.
The intelligence community had been chasing a ghost, a ghost with an army. The men who were going to change that were not analysts. They were not intelligence officers sitting in air-conditioned buildings moving data between screens. They were operators assigned to 1st SFOD-D, which the military calls the Combat Applications Group, which the press calls Delta Force, and which the people inside it call simply the unit.
Delta Force had been built in 1977 by a colonel named Charles Beckwith, who had spent time training with the British SAS and came home convinced that America needed exactly what he had seen. A small group ruthlessly selected trained past the point where most elite sold.i.ers stop sent to do things that no one else could do and that no one could officially talk about afterward.
By 2015, Delta Force had been at war for 14 straight years. They had operated in Iraq during the worst of the insurgency. They had hunted Al-Qaeda leadership across multiple countries. They had gone places and done things that will not appear in any public record for decades. And now they were in Syria operating without a formal agreement, without legal cover that anyone could point to clearly in a country that was breaking apart in every direction at once.
There were Assad regime forces, Russian military advisers, Kurdish militias, Turkish-backed groups and the Islamic State all occupying overlapping territories. It was the most complicated battlefield American special forces had faced since Vietnam. Delta Force was running missions anyway. And the approach they chose to find al-Baghdadi was not what anyone expected.
In fact, most of the people watching from the outside thought it was impossible. What they proposed was simple and brutal. Stop hunting al-Baghdadi directly. Start hunting his network so fast, so hard and so continuously that the network would eventually crack and lead straight to him. Every raid would produce intelligence.
Every piece of intelligence would generate a new target. Every new target would produce more intelligence the following night. The loop would not stop. It would not slow down. It would run until there was nothing left to run against or until the man at the top of the pyramid had nowhere left to hide. The idea was not completely new.
General Stanley McChrystal had built something similar in Iraq in the mid-2000s. But what Delta Force was about to do in Syria would take that approach and push it to a place that even the people who invented it had never seen before. The pace they were about to operate at would have seemed unrealistic on paper. On the ground, it would produce results that shocked even the people watching from the outside, including a group of British operators who had thought they had seen everything.
What those British operators were about to witness was not just speed. It was not just precision. It was something harder to name, something that lives in the space between training and instinct, between discipline and fury. When you run enough raids in enough darkness against enough men who want to kill you, something changes.
The fear does not go away, but it stops being the loudest thing in the room. These men had been to that place so many times that they had built a permanent home there. They did not visit the edge, they lived on it. The British SAS had their own word for operators who reached that level. It was not a formal term.
It was not something that appeared in any training manual or after-action report. It was something passed quietly between men who had spent enough time in enough hard places to recognize it when they saw it. They would use it about Delta Force, but not yet. Because first, Delta Force had to do something that no special operations unit had ever attempted at this scale.
And what happened next would change how the entire Western military world thought about what was possible. There were years of work ahead. Years of raids, exploitation, intelligence, targeting, and relentless forward pressure through one of the most dangerous operating environments on Earth. Nights that would never be fully documented, running against a network that killed people for sport, in a country that did not officially want them there, for a mission that had no guaranteed ending.
The helicopters were still months away from Barisha. The dog named Conan had not yet been deployed. Al-Baghdadi was still breathing, still moving, still trusting that no one could reach him. He was wrong. He just did not know it yet. The raid started small. That is how it always begins with Delta Force. Not with a single massive operation that announces itself to the world, but with a quiet, grinding accumulation of pressure applied night after night until the thing being pressed against starts to crack. In 2015 and into 2016, Delta
Force elements operating in Syria running what people inside JSOC called a raid cycle. From the outside, the term sounds clean and mechanical, like something you would read in a training document. From the inside, it was something else entirely. Here is how it worked. An intelligence lead would come in, sometimes from Kurdish partner forces on the ground, who had eyes in places American drones could not reach.
Sometimes from technical collection that flagged a phone or a location. Sometimes from the previous night’s raid. That lead would be assessed, a target would be built, and a team would go out that night. They would hit the location fast and hard, clear every room, secure every person, and then immediately begin collecting everything that was not nailed down.
Phones, hard drives, laptops, notebooks, scraps of paper with numbers written on them, SIM cards, photographs, documents in Arabic that would be photographed and sent to analysts within the hour. The team would be back at their forward operating base before sunrise. The analysts would be working through the night. By the following evening, a new target had been identified from the material taken in the previous raid, and the cycle would begin again.
But here is the part that even experienced special operations commanders found hard to believe when they first heard it. Most special operations units built rest periods between raids. Planning timelines were measured in days, sometimes weeks, to allow for proper intelligence development, rehearsals, equipment checks, and contingency planning.
These were not arbitrary luxuries. They existed because tired men make mistakes, and mistakes in close quarters battle get people killed. Delta Force knew this. Their commanders knew this. And they ran the cycle anyway because the intelligence window was perishable, and because every hour of delay was an hour al-Baghdadi’s network had to shift, adapt, and disappear back into the noise.
The physical reality of what this meant for the men running it is important to understand. A direct action raid in a hostile environment is not like a training exercise. The moment the helicopters lift, the adrenaline starts. By the time boots hit the ground, the body is operating at a level it was not designed to sustain for long periods. Heart rate spikes, perception narrows, every sound becomes a potential threat.
The noise of the breach, the disorientation of moving through a structure where someone may be waiting around every corner, the split-second decisions that cannot be undone. All of it hits the body like a physical blow, and then it ends. And then the crash comes. And then, sometimes within 24 hours, the whole thing begins again.
And yet, these men kept going night after night, week after week. And what they were building without fully knowing it was going to end with one of the most audacious raids in American military history. Operators on sustained rotations in Syria during this period were managing injuries rather than treating them.
A sprained ankle that would have sent a conventional sold.i.er to the aid station for a week was taped, treated with whatever was available, and carried forward. Sleep was compressed into whatever window existed between the end of one mission and the beginning of the next target development cycle. Food was functional rather than pleasurable.
The men running this cycle for months at a stretch were not superhuman. They were human beings who had been selected specifically because they could operate closer to their limit than almost anyone else alive and who had decided, collectively and individually, that the mission was worth what it was costing them.
The British operators who were beginning to observe this from adjacent positions had not expected it. They had expected excellence. Delta Force was the best American unit and the SAS had a deep professional respect for what the unit could do. What they had not fully anticipated was the tempo. SAS squadrons running operations in Iraq during the same period were executing at a high level, producing results, and operating aggressively by any conventional standard.
But the pace Delta Force had found in Syria was something different. It was not just more raids. It was a different relationship with the concept of limits entirely. Then came May 15th, 2015. Eastern Syria, a compound near Dayr az-Zawr, deep inside Islamic State territory, far from any friendly force that could respond if something went wrong.
Delta Force launched a raid against a senior IS leader known as Abu Sayyaf, not the Filipino militant group that shares the name, but the man responsible for managing the Islamic State’s oil revenue, one of the primary financial architects of the caliphate’s ability to function as a state. He was not a fighter in the traditional sense.
He was an administrator, but administrators at that level knew things that fighters did not. They knew names, they knew locations, they knew how the money moved and who moved it. And what Delta Force found inside that compound would crack open the Islamic State’s financial empire and, years later, lead them directly to al-Baghdadi himself.
The compound was harder than pre-mission intelligence had suggested. The defenders were ready and they fought. The assault teams hit it anyway, moved through the resistance, and cleared the structure with a speed that compressed what should have been a prolonged firefight into something much shorter and more decisive.
Abu Sayyaf was killed. His wife, known as Umm Sayyaf, was captured alive and would later provide significant intelligence about the Islamic State’s internal structure. From the compound itself, Delta Force pulled out a collection of hard drives, documents, and communication records that the intelligence community would spend months working through.
What those hard drives contained began to reshape the hunt. Financial records revealed the names and locations of IS facilitators across multiple countries. Communication logs identified couriers who connected different levels of the organization. Documents outlined relationships between IS leadership figures that had previously been invisible to coalition intelligence.
The Abu Sayyaf raid did not find al-Baghdadi, but it opened doors that had been closed, and behind some of those doors were paths that, followed carefully over the following years, would eventually lead to a compound in a small village called Barisha. Allied units read into the mission details afterward described the raid as exceptional, even by special operation standards.
The range of the operation, the quality of the execution under fire, and the intelligence value of what was recovered combined into something that analysts and operators talked about for months. It was the clearest confirmation yet of what Delta Force had been building in Syria. The cycle was working.
The compression of time between intelligence and action was producing results that a slower approach was not producing. The network was being touched. It was beginning to feel the pressure, but the British operators watching from the outside were still only seeing the beginning. What was coming next would push the cycle to a level none of them had anticipated.
The SAS operators watching alongside Delta Force had not yet found the words they would eventually reach for. That moment was still years away, waiting at the end of a long road of dark nights and hard miles and a tunnel that did not yet exist in anyone’s planning documents. But something had already shifted in how they saw the men running beside them.
The professional respect that had always been there was deepening into something else, something closer to awe, something that the culture of special operations rarely produces and never gives away cheaply. They were something being built. They did not know yet what it would become. By 2017, the Islamic State had lost most of the territory it had seized so dramatically just 3 years earlier.
Mosul fell in July after a 9-month battle that killed thousands and left the city in ruins. Raqqa, the self-declared capital of the caliphate, fell in October. The oil fields were gone. The tax revenue had collapsed. The men who had traveled from Europe, America, and Australia to fight for al-Baghdadi were dead, imprisoned, or scattered.
The Islamic State as a functioning government was finished. Al-Baghdadi was still alive. He had gone deeper underground than before, which most analysts had not thought was possible. He communicated through a chain of couriers so carefully constructed that each link knew only the link directly above and below it.
He never used a phone. He never met with more than a handful of people at any one time. He moved between locations in northwestern Syria, specifically in Idlib province near the Turkish border, a region controlled not by the Islamic State, but by a separate militant group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. He was hiding inside another enemy’s territory, which meant that any operation to reach him would be moving through layers of hostile ground that had nothing to do with the original target.
The complexity was deliberate. It was the last defense of a man who had watched everyone around him get killed and had drawn exactly the right conclusions about why. But Delta Force had been building something for years that al-Baghdadi had not accounted for. And in 2019, that something finally found him. The raid cycle had done its work.
Years of raids, years of exploitation, years of following every thread from every compound and every hard drive, and every captured courier had built a picture of al-Baghdadi’s protective layer that the intelligence community had never had before. The analysts knew the names. They knew the relationships.
They knew which couriers moved between which nodes of the network. And sometime in 2019, one of those couriers was identified, tracked, and connected to a specific location in Idlib province. The CIA brought in an asset. The intelligence was checked against everything collected over years of relentless pressure. The location was confirmed.
The compound was a three-story structure in a small village called Barisha, roughly 5 km from the Turkish border. The mission required permission from the top. President Trump was briefed. The decision was made not to inform congressional leadership in advance, a choice that would produce political friction for weeks afterward.
But in the planning room, that calculation was secondary to operational security. Turkish authorities were notified in a narrow window before launch, just enough time to arrange safe helicopter passage without giving al-Baghdadi time to move. Eight helicopters, roughly 70 Delta Force operators, Army Rangers positioned for external security, Apache attack helicopters and AC-130 gunships orbiting overhead.
Two hours of flight each way, much of it over ground where being shot down was a real possibility, and rescue would have been extremely difficult. Every contingency had been planned for except the ones that only reveal themselves when boots hit the ground and the shooting starts. There was one contingency the planners had thought about more carefully than any other.
And it would turn out to be the most important decision of the entire mission. Al-Baghdadi was known to wear a suicide vest. He had spoken about martyrdom publicly and often. If he ran and if he reached a place where he felt cornered, he would not surrender. The assault plan had to account for a man who intended to d.i.e and intended to take people with him.
That is why military working dogs were part of the package. A Belgian Malinois named Conan was among the assets on those helicopters that night. Dogs can pursue through confined spaces. They can drive a target toward a dead end faster than any human assault team. If Al-Baghdadi ran into a tunnel, Conan would follow him there.
October 26th, 2019, 11:00 at night local time. The helicopters lifted. Syrian air defense radar systems, including Russian-operated equipment, detected the aircraft crossing into Syrian airspace. No one fired. Whether that was the result of back-channel coordination with Moscow or simply a decision not to engage an unknown force moving at low altitude and high speed at night, it does not matter.
The helicopters kept moving. Two hours of low flight over broken hostile terrain, eight aircraft running without lights, 70 men sitting with their own thoughts and their weapons and years of accumulated work coming down to a single point. The helicopters landed outside the compound perimeter.
The assault teams moved immediately. The defenders inside opened fire. The firefight at the outer wall was sharp and brief. Delta Force operators moved through it like it was a minor inconvenience, which at that point in their history it essentially was. They had been in harder fights on less important nights. The perimeter was taken.
The breach teams hit the structure. They moved through the ground floor fast and hard, clearing rooms with the mechanical efficiency of men who had performed this exact sequence of actions hundreds of times in hundreds of buildings across a decade and a half of continuous war. Al-Baghdadi was not on the ground floor.
He had done something that changed the entire nature of the mission. And what came next was unlike anything the assault teams had trained for on any exercise anywhere. He had gone into the tunnel system beneath the compound, taking three of his young children with him. The tunnel was narrow, dark, and long enough that the assault team could not simply follow him in immediately without risking being channeled into a fatal position. So, they sent Conan.
The dog went into the passage after him, driving Al-Baghdadi toward the far end, toward the wall he could not pass through, toward the moment he had always claimed was coming. At the end of the tunnel, with Conan closing behind him and no exit ahead, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated his suicide vest. The explosion killed him and the three children beside him and partially collapsed the tunnel around them.
Delta Force operators entered after the blast. They secured the site. They collected biometric samples. DNA results confirmed Al-Baghdadi’s identity within hours. The entire ground operation lasted approximately 30 minutes from the moment the helicopters landed to the moment they lifted again.
No American personnel were killed. Conan was injured by debris from the explosion, treated in the field, and returned to duty within days. And then came the moment this whole story had been building toward. Because the British SAS, men who had seen everything this world of war had to offer, looked at the full picture of what Delta Force had done across those years, and reached for only two words.
The British SAS operators and liaison personnel who were briefed on the mission in full, who had watched the pace in the raid’s compound year after year to reach this single night, reached for the only language that felt accurate. These men were absolute animals. Not a criticism, not a complaint. The highest possible acknowledgement one group of elite warriors can offer another.
It means you have gone somewhere that most people cannot follow, that you have operated at a level that even professionals who share your world find difficult to fully comprehend. The SAS had been the gold standard of western special operations for 70 years. For them to look at another unit and reach for those words meant something that no metal or citation could fully capture.
But the story does not end clean. It never does. Al-Baghdadi was dead and the Islamic State was not. A new leader emerged within days. Attacks continued across Syria and Iraq. Affiliated groups in Africa and Southeast Asia accelerated their operations. The three children who d.i.ed in that tunnel were not fighters. They were there because their father chose to bring them into the dark rather than face what was coming alone.
That fact sits in the record beside every other fact in this story and it belongs there because the full truth of what happened in Barisha on that October night includes all of it, not just the parts that are easy to carry. The helicopters turned toward home. The world found out the next morning.
President Trump stood in the diplomatic room of the White House and described the raid in terms that were unusually specific for a sitting president discussing a classified special operations mission. He talked about the tunnel. He talked about the dog. He talked about Al-Baghdadi dying, whimpering, and crying, and screaming in his final moments.
A characterization that military officials would later quietly walk back, noting that no one could have heard anything clearly after a suicide vest detonation in an enclosed space. The political moment had arrived and political moments have their own gravity that pulls details and directions the mission file does not always support.
The men who had actually been in that compound were already back at their base cleaning their weapons eating whatever was available and preparing for the next mission. That is the first thing the legacy of Barisha teaches. The men who do the work are almost never the ones who get to define what it meant.
But here is what happened next that most people never talk about. Because al-Baghdadi’s d.e.a.t.h did not end this story. It started a new chapter that shows exactly how deep the problem really runs. Just over two years later in February 2022, President Biden stood before the same cameras in the White House and announced that al-Baghdadi’s successor, a man who had taken the name Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, had been killed in a raid by American special operations forces.
The location was Atma, Syria in Idlib province. Less than 20 miles from Barisha. He had also detonated a suicide vest when cornered, killing himself and members of his own family. The pattern repeated itself almost exactly against the man who had stepped directly into al-Baghdadi’s place.
A third IS leader, Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, was killed by Syrian rebel forces in 2022. A fourth, Abu Hussein al-Husayni al-Qurashi, was killed in a Turkish operation in 2023. The caliphate was gone. The organization kept producing leaders. The raids kept finding them. This is the uncomfortable arithmetic at the center of the story.
The raid cycle that Delta Force built and ran in Syria was one of the most effective direct action programs in the history of American special operations. The results are not in serious dispute. The network was degraded. Key figures were killed or captured. Intelligence was produced that enabled further operations across multiple theaters.
The man at the top was found in a tunnel 5 km from the Turkish border and confirmed dead within hours of the mission launch. He said by any operational standard, it worked. And the Islamic State still exists. So, what does that mean? It means that what Delta Force accomplished was something extraordinary.
And that extraordinary is sometimes still not enough. And understanding that truth is the only honest way to look at what these men are and what they are not. Right now, IS affiliates are active in West Africa, the Sahel, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and the Southern Philippines.
The core organization in Syria and Iraq continues to conduct attacks. The ideology al-Baghdadi weaponized did not d.i.e in that tunnel with him. It had already spread too far and taken root in too many places to be killed by any single mission or any single unit or any single strategy built around finding and finishing individual human beings.
This does not mean the raids were wrong. It means that raids are a tool and tools only solve the problems they are designed to solve. Delta Force was built to go where others cannot go and do what others cannot do. They fulfilled that purpose completely. What happens after the helicopters come home is a different problem, one that belongs to politicians, diplomats, development workers, and educators.
Every category of human being who does not train at Fort Bragg and does not carry a weapon into the dark. The failure to solve the larger problem is not a failure of the men who ran the mission. It is a failure of the system surrounding them and that is a much bigger conversation than any single video can contain.
The men of Delta Force who ran those raids in Syria, who built the cycle and pushed it to a tempo that shocked even the SAS, do not have a public epilogue. Their names are not known. Their decorations, many of them, are classified at levels that will not be reviewed for decades. Some are still serving.
Some have retired into the private sector, working in security, training, consulting, living ordinary lives in ordinary neighborhoods where the man next door has no idea what the quiet guy on the block has done or where he has been. Some carry injuries that are visible. Some carry injuries that are not. The transition from that life to any other life is its own kind of mission.
And it is one that the institution does not always prepare people for as well as it prepares them for everything else. And yet these men would go back tomorrow, every single one of them. That is the thing that makes Delta Force different from almost everything else on Earth. And one man said something publicly that captures it better than anything written in any classified file.
Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Major Thomas Payne, a Delta Force operator awarded the nation’s highest military honor for his actions during a hostage rescue in Iraq in 2015, described the mission of his unit in a press conference as going where others cannot or will not go. Not as a boast, as a simple statement of function.
That is what Delta Force is. That is what it was built to be. That is what the men running that cycle in Syria were expressing every night they lifted off and pressed the mission forward one more turn. The SAS called them absolute animals. That phrase has traveled through the special operations community the way such things travel, quietly and quickly, passed between people who understand its full weight.
In the culture of elite military units where understatement is the norm and direct praise between professionals is rare and meaningful, those two words carry more than any formal citation written by someone who was not in the room. They are the assessment of equals. They are the acknowledgement of men who have been to the same hard places and who recognize, in the way only experience can produce, what it takes to do what Delta Force did in Syria across those years and on one October night.
But, sit with the word itself for a moment. Animal. In that world, it is the highest compliment available. It is also a word that describes something operating outside the boundaries of ordinary human restraint. Both things are true at the same time. The men who ran into that tunnel were the best trained, most carefully selected, most experienced direct action operators on Earth.
They were also human beings chasing a suicide bomber through a collapsing passage beneath a Syrian village in a country they were not officially supposed to be in at the end of years of continuous high-intensity operations that had cost them in ways that no after-action report will ever fully capture. They were both things simultaneously.
The compliment and the cost live in the same space. And that is the thing about war that the headlines never quite manage to say. It is the last truth of this story, and it is the one that stays with you. War produces people capable of things that peacetime cannot produce and peacetime cannot fully absorb.
It creates a specific kind of excellence that only exists inside a specific kind of darkness. The men who have it are extraordinary. The fact that we need them is not. The last image of this story is the one released publicly in the days after the Barisha raid, a photograph of Conan, the Belgian Malinois, standing in the Oval Office beside the President of the United States, surrounded by generals and officials in pressed uniforms.
The dog is looking at the camera with the flat, direct attention of an animal that has no interest in the ceremony around it. It does not know what it did. It does not know what any of it meant. It ran into the tunnel because it was trained to run into the tunnel and because that is what was asked of it. A Delta Force operator, speaking anonymously to a journalist in the days after the raid, was asked what it felt like to finally finish the mission after years of hunting.
He said, “We don’t ask if we’re going. We ask when.”
