A sleepless night in Syria: Witnesses recount U.S. assault on ISIS leader

Ahmed, who spoke on the condition that he be identified by only his first name due to safety reasons, went up to his roof, he said in a telephone interview. The thunder of the helicopters was eclipsed by a terrible clatter — of gunfire “from the sky,” he said.

A sleepless night across Syria’s northern Idlib province Thursday brought alarming sounds, deadly violence and a barrage of breathless rumors. Grainy cellphone videos were passed around depicting fragments of an event — muzzle flashes, shouted entreaties — whose contours only emerged later, after the sun rose on a partially demolished and bloodied cinder block home.

Mahmoud al-Sheikh, who works at an auto repair shop less than a mile from the house, had also been kept awake by the sounds. He said he heard a soldier giving orders over a loudspeaker. “Children and women, leave. We are entering the house,” someone said.

Sheikh said he did not know who lived in the house, in the Syrian town of Atma, but he said he often saw women and small children coming in and out.

There was nothing terribly extraordinary about the men in the house, he added, saying they did not outwardly match the description of hard line Islamist fighters who often wore long beards.

Residents who lived close to the house told Omar Nezhat, a local journalists, that they were interrogated by the soldiers, who marked their foreheads with numbers and told them not to worry because American forces were there to kill an ISIS leader.

At least a dozen people, including six children, were killed along with Qurayshi, according to local first responders. The Pentagon said that three members of his family were killed when Qurayshi detonated an explosive device on the top floor of the building, along with a child who was killed on the floor below in circumstances that remained unclear.

The first responders, known as the White Helmets, said survivors of the night’s violence included a man who lived near the house and a young girl whose entire family was killed. For a time, they said, the girl was unable to speak, from the shock.

The group wasn’t sure how the other victims died. “Truthfully all the bodies were largely covered in blood, sometimes it could not be discerned if it was bullets or explosions,” a spokesman said in a message.

Dadouch reported from Beirut.

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