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Monday, 28 October 2019

Last night’s talk shows for Sunday, 28 October 2019

The talking heads were squarely focused on the untimely death of the king of the Daeshbags: Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. Every host with no exception took note of yesterday’s biggest global news story, and spoke to experts and researchers to break down what the US-led operation might mean for the terror organization.

Al Baghdadi died in a raid by US special forces in Syria’s Idlib on Saturday evening, US President Donald Trump confirmed in a nationally televised speech yesterday. Trump had tweeted on Saturday evening that “something very big has just happened,” without elaborating at the time.

The first word goes to the smartest woman on nighttime TV: Al Kahera Alaan’s Lamees El Hadidi hosted Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies terrorism expert Ahmed El Behairy for a lengthy segment (watch, runtime: 17:19). Lamees’ lawfully wedded husband Amr Adib, meanwhile, chatted with Islamic researcher Sameh Eid over the phone (watch, runtime: 4:43).

The White House takes from the Obama playbook? El Behairy pointed to similarities between Saturday’s operation and the handling (and White House media management of) the Obama-era raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. “The same [US special] forces targeted Al Baghdadi,” El Behairy said. The timing of the attack was also similar, Behairy said, noting that both Obama and Trump managed to catch themselves some international terrorists prior to an election. (We can’t help but call El Behairy on this one: There is still over a year to go before Trump has to face the voters, and the bin Laden raid took place a full 18 months before the 2012 election.)

Did Turkey just give Baghdadi to the US as a quid pro quo? Masaa DMC’s Eman El Hosary spoke to Heba El Koudsy, Washington bureau chief of the London-based Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, who suggested that Turkey could have exchanged intelligence on Baghdadi’s whereabouts in a quid-pro-quo (watch, runtime: 13:02).

Expect the story to continue shaping the international news cycle today. See, for example, coverage in the New York Times | Financial Times | Wall Street Journal | Reuters).

The aftermath of last week’s rain was the second most popular topic. El Hadidi spoke to MPs Moataz Mahmoud and Mahmoud El Husseiny about last week’s torrential rain, both of whom criticized the government’s handling of the crisis. Although Egypt’s infrastructure isn’t equipped for such volumes of water, they claimed that the situation could have been mitigated had the sewer network been cleared. And things might get tricky for the local development minister, after Mahmoud said he would question him about the crisis in the House (watch, runtime: 26:14).

While we urban dwellers were suffering, our North Sinai compatriots were a little more thankful: The heavy rainfall was a welcome event in cities across North Sinai as some 5 bn cubic meters of water were stored in the Rawafaa Dam near Gabal El Halal to the south of Arish. Governor Mohamed Shousha congratulated his people in a phone call with El Hekaya’s Adib (watch, runtime: 4:40).

Also getting a bit of attention: President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s meetings yesterday with officials on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference Core Group in Cairo (watch, runtime: 3:48) and ongoing protests in Lebanon (watch, runtime: 0:55).

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