Who Was Islamic State Leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi?
Who Was Islamic State Leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi?
(Bloomberg) -- Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in a U.S. military operation in northern Syria, led a terrorist group that slaughtered thousands during a fearsome rise to power stopped only after an international military coalition was formed to bring it down.
Baghdadi, who transformed himself from a little-known teacher of Koranic recitation into the self-proclaimed ruler of an entity that covered swaths of Syria and Iraq, was killed along with a number of his followers, U.S. President Donald Trump said. His body was mutilated after he detonated a suicide vest while fleeing into a dead-end tunnel.
On the run from one hideout to the other since losing control of his two strongholds, he was rarely seen in public. He “died like a dog. He died like a coward,” Trump said.
It was a far cry from the day he announced his caliphate in 2014, with his supporters vowing to dissolve the Middle East boundaries set by colonial powers almost a century ago.
Seizing oil wealth in the areas he captured, the Iraqi-born man built an organization that was able to recruit and unite thousands of followers with the promise of an Islamic revival built on “dignity, might, rights and leadership.”
The focus on grabbing territory and capitalizing on captured riches won him the loyalty of extremists from the U.K. to the Philippines. U.S. intelligence agencies have estimated that more than 40,000 foreigners from at least 120 countries joined the group.
While some followers traveled to fight in Syria and Iraq, others seized on the Islamic State brand to fashion homegrown movements and attacks.
But the group’s fall was almost as quick and stunning as its rise. In some of the toughest urban combat seen in the region in decades, his fighters were expelled from the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2017 by Iraqi troops and Kurdish fighters, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes.
The loss of Mosul was both symbolic and strategic.
It was from a mosque in the city that he declared himself caliph in July 2014, and its fall cost the group its last major urban center in Iraq. A year later, the group’s self-declared capital in Syria, Raqqa, was also lost. That left Islamic State’s remaining fighters clinging to pockets of land along the Syrian-Iraqi border -- a shadow of the territory it once held.
In a biography circulated on its websites, Islamic State said Baghdadi was born in 1971 to a religious family in the Iraqi city of Samarra. There aren’t many known images of him. Even within his own organization, he was nicknamed “the invisible sheikh.”
Baghdadi, whose real name is thought to be Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri, was known to have been married a few times. One wife, named as Saja al-Duleimi, was detained by Lebanese authorities in 2014 and later released in a prisoner swap.
Terrorist Incubator
Like other terrorist leaders in Iraq, the seeds of Baghdadi’s discontent found fertile ground in the U.S. invasion of 2003. Baghdadi was imprisoned at Camp Bucca, a U.S. detention center in southern Iraq that became an incubator for extremism.
After he was released, the small jihadist group he led pledged allegiance to the bigger Islamic State of Iraq, which had been around in various forms for about a decade and was trying to fuel a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis.
When its leader was killed in a 2010 airstrike, Baghdadi became chief -- assuming the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Qurashi. The use of “all-Qurashi” was intended to signify descent from the Quraysh tribe to which the Prophet Muhammad was born, a lineage widely disputed by scholars.
One of his first major operations as leader of the group was to free jihadist leaders and fighters from Iraqi prisons. They helped to bolster his ranks and, by early 2013, his forces had grown in war-torn Syria. The unrest there allowed various groups to carve out fiefdoms and boost their finances.
March on Mosul
But it was in Iraq that Islamic State would launch its biggest offensive, beginning with its march on Mosul in June 2014. From there, they headed south toward Baghdad, triggering fears that the country would break up along sectarian and ethnic lines.
The advance galvanized the world into action, forging a coalition of western and Arab nations alarmed at the spread of the movement’s doctrine and its growing appeal for radicalized young Muslims -- some of whom would launch attacks in Brussels, Paris, London and Tehran.
The U.S. returned to the Iraqi battlefield to help counter the threat in August 2014, with American fighter jets pounding Islamic State targets.
Within 18 months the group already had begun to lose territory. Across the border in Syria, Russia’s military also fought Islamic State as it sought to bolster its ally ruling from Damascus. As Islamic State’s territory shrank, it struggled to justify its claim of a caliphate and the flow of foreign fighters eased.
“The organization had already taken a massive hit because its main claim to fame was it had territory, and the territory shrunk tremendously over the past few years,” said HA Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and the Carnegie Endowment. “He wasn’t the caliph anymore -- or not the caliph of anything noteworthy.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Tarek El-Tablawy in cairo at teltablawy@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at asalha@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Caroline Alexander
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