Warning: graphic descriptions

Istanbul: The sound of helicopters was nothing new. They often arrived to ferry out Turkish troops stationed near Ahmed’s town, a stone’s throw from Syria’s border with Turkey. But this was different.

“The sound was horrible,” he said, describing the swarm of US military helicopters that descended on a home less than two miles away from Ahmed’s house early Thursday, on a mission to kill IS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.

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 on Thursday brought alarming sounds, deadly violence and a barrage of breathless rumours.

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 a kilometre 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.