Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis leader
The Iraqi jihadi is using savagery and social media to extend his influence
He crowned himself caliph of the Muslim nation, successor to the Prophet Mohammed, and chose a religiously charged day – the start of the holy month of Ramadan – to deliver a landmark speech to his subjects.
The calm voice of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi echoed grandly in the audio file released this week as he implored the world’s Muslims to rush to his newly created caliphate across Syria and Iraq. He would, he pledged, return to them “dignity, might, rights and leadership”.
Mr Baghdadi touched on practical considerations, too, calling for doctors, engineers, judges and experts in Islamic jurisprudence to join him. His intended audience extended beyond the Arab world: within minutes, translations into multiple languages, including English, French and German, had appeared on jihadi websites.
But the man better known until now as chief terrorist of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, failed to impress the wider Muslim community. “An illusion and a mirage” is how one prominent Sunni Muslim scholar described the declaration of a caliphate.
This seems to matter little to Mr Baghdadi, whose delusions of grandeur were inflated when his fighters advanced rapidly through northern Iraq last month, adding swaths of territory to areas under his control in Syria. Even if his offensive appears to have stalled north of Baghdad, it has inflicted possibly fatal damage on the unity of Iraq and shaken the ground under other Middle Eastern nations.
To some extent, Mr Baghdadi has already achieved his ambition: he has risen from obscurity to leading star of the Sunni jihadi movement and established himself as the world’s number one terrorist.
His longstanding mission to inherit the legacy of Osama bin Laden has been bolstered by a disciplined force of local and foreign fighters, and a remarkably slick social media campaign.
The drive to rival the al-Qaeda of bin Laden has defined Mr Baghdadi’s career since he joined the organisation in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion. He was schooled in the ruthless jihadi movement of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda. Zarqawi had considered himself a competitor to bin Laden, ignoring warnings from the leadership to refrain from excessive brutality towards fellow Sunni.
Zarqawi was killed by American forces in 2006 as Sunni tribes began to turn against his militants and liberated much of Iraq’s Sunni region from al-Qaeda. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, his successor, died in a US air strike raid in 2010.
Mr Baghdadi took over just as US troops were preparing to withdraw from Iraq. It is to avoid the fate of his predecessors – and perhaps to foster his cult of personality – that he has remained a mystery, rarely if ever seen or heard. Some of his followers say he appears among them only in disguise. Unlike other jihadi leaders, he avoids releasing videos, preferring to bombard social media with co-ordinated propaganda. The one picture available is a grainy mugshot released by the US, with a $10m reward for information leading to his capture.
The little that is known about his early life is derived from a one-page biography circulating on jihadi sites that cannot be independently verified. Reported to be in his 40s, Mr Baghdadi is said to have been born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri to a family of preachers from the town of Samarra in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad. He earned a doctorate at the Islamic University of Baghdad before taking up a preacher’s position at a mosque in Samarra. His biography stresses that he rose through the ranks of al-Qaeda in Iraq, taking part in military operations before being appointed to the ruling council.
His jihadi career was interrupted in 2006, when he was captured by US troops. In Camp Bucca, then the largest US detention centre in Iraq, he kept a low profile, returning after his release in 2009 to the western province of Anbar to pick up where he had left off. “He was a bad dude but he wasn’t the worst of the worst,” Colonel Kenneth King, then Camp Bucca’s commanding officer, told the Daily Beast. Even his parting comment did not register as a credible threat: “I’ll see you guys in New York.”
Isis’s militants are taught that the basic objective is to erase the borders between Syria and Iraq. They are told that al-Qaeda has become irrelevant after the death of bin Laden
Yet within a year, Mr Baghdadi had been elevated to the leadership of the group now known as Isis. His break came when he sent extremist fighters to join a largely Sunni rebellion against the regime in Syria. The war next door to Iraq attracted foreign jihadis and allowed him to develop an independent source of financing in racketeering and oil smuggling. Most importantly, it offered him the first concrete chance to put his vision of an Islamic state into practice, blurring the frontiers between Arab states.
It is in Syria, and precisely over this transnational vision, that Mr Baghdadi officially broke ranks with al-Qaeda, sparring with Ayman al-Zawahiri, successor to bin Laden. Mr Baghdadi has never recognised Mr Zawahiri’s authority and rejected his attempts to maintain a separation between the Syrian and Iraqi jihadi fronts.
“Isis’s militants are taught that the basic objective is to erase the borders between Syria and Iraq,” says a person who has spent time with the jihadis. “They are told that al-Qaeda has become irrelevant after the death of bin Laden.”
While he may have demonstrated his military might, at least for now, it is in Mr Baghdadi’s rush to capitalise on the battlefield gains that he is overreaching. With dubious religious credentials, his declaration of a caliphate has won more ridicule than respect. “The core strength of his organisation is military not religious authority,” says Jessica Lewis, a former US army intelligence officer now research director at the Institute for the Study of War in the US. Mr Baghdadi might be celebrated by aspiring jihadis for his audacity but he is likely to be felled by his arrogance.