“U.S. Special operations forces executed a dangerous and daring night-time raid in northwestern Syria, and accomplished their mission in grand style. The U.S. personnel were incredible.”

But the question now should not be avoided: why was al-Baghdadi hiding so close to Turkey? Were the Turks protecting him? If not them, then who was? It strains credulity that Turkey, with its interests in northern Syria, did not know he was there. Al-Baghdadi was killed in Barisha in the Idlib province, a town of no more than 2500 people right on the Turkish border. If the Turks didn’t know that the world’s most wanted terrorist was there, they’re incompetent beyond measure. If they did know, they’re complicit in protecting him.

Given the track record of the Turkish government in aiding the Islamic State, complicity is much more likely than cluelessness. There ought to be a full investigation of Turkey’s involvement, and if the Erdogan regime is definitively found to have been protecting al-Baghdadi, Turkey should be expelled from NATO and the sham alliance with the United States ended. Given, however, the determined head-in-the-sand policy of the State Department establishment, none of that is likely to happen.

Meanwhile, the Islamic State is likely to go on pretty much as it has for the last year or two, after losing almost all of the area of its former caliphate in Iraq and Syria. If al-Baghdadi has a successor, he will be, like al-Baghdadi himself, a caliph without a caliphate. The Islamic State is still very much a presence around the world, but doesn’t control any significant expanse of territory, as it did when Barack Obama was President.

In fact, al-Baghdadi’s death is unlikely to affect ISIS as an international jihad terror group very much at all. Al-Baghdadi was hardly ever seen in the last few years, which was a function of his having a large bounty on his head, but it also may have been chosen as a strategy for other reasons: the Islamic State leadership may have decided that his power was enhanced by his being more mythical than real — an omnipresent but gnomic presence a la Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984.

Also, because the Islamic State is an ideologically driven movement, it hardly matters whether he is dead or alive: obviously the Islamic State has soldiered on without his having become a familiar media figure, and has maintained its claim to be the caliphate even without control of territory. It almost certainly will continue to do so.