Killing Daesh leader at center of Trump 2020 campaign

Taking credit for the alleged killing of Daesh chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appears to be playing a key role in US President Donald Trump’s reelection bid.

Trump has been bragging about the October 26 raid at the Takfiri leader’s compound in northern Syria, including in rallies held ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

"He was a savage and soulless monster but his reign of terror is over," the president said at a rally in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Trump, whose 50-minute television appearance for the raid was compared to former President Barrack Obama’s much shorter statement in the wake of then-al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's alleged death, even claimed that the announcement was “played down.”

“That story disappeared so fast, gone. And that’s OK. I didn’t do it for the story. I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Trump said Friday night. “If I was a Democrat, they’d be talking about it for weeks. With me, they don't even want to – they actually played it down."

The reelection campaign has even gone as far as releasing a political ad crediting the president with “obliterating ISIS (Daesh).”

PressTV-US releases contents on Baghdadi raid

The United States has released a number of declassified images and video from the raid that left Daesh chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dead.

There are, meanwhile, those who believe that the US military’s alleged elimination of the Daesh leader would not actually affect the 2020 race as Trump’s supporter would vote for him anyway and his opponents would not change their minds because he was in the White House when a terrorist was killed.

Many parties have also raised doubt about the reality of the raid on Baghdadi’s compound in the outskirts of Barisha in Syria’s Idlib province.

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