Al-Kasasbeh’s recorded account of his December 24 mission mostly followed the actual events. An F-16 pilot with nearly three years of experience, the Jordanian had been assigned to hit ISIS targets inside a grid of coordinates that included the city of Raqqa. His plane was part of an armada of Arab and Western aircraft that had been bombing ISIS since September 2014, when President Barack Obama launched an expanded air campaign in an attempt to drive the terrorist group from its safe havens in Iraq and Syria. Obama had ordered U.S. warplanes and drones into Iraq a few weeks earlier to halt an
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