Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

• 1. Introduction

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  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi left so faint an impression on Ahmed al-Dabash that al-Dabash dismissed him as insignificant. Al-Dabash led the Islamic Army of Iraq and fought the allied invasion in 2003. He said he had known the insurgency's leaders personally and counted Zarqawi as closer than a brother. Of al-Baghdadi, a fellow student, he said: "No one really noticed him."

  That overlooked man went on to head an organization that the United Nations and almost all sovereign states designated as terrorist. How does someone so unnoticed come to hold that kind of power? What did he build, what did it cost the people around him, and why do even basic facts about his life remain disputed? And how did a man who spent years avoiding cameras and telephones finally run out of places to hide?

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• 2. A Borrowed Name

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  In 2014 the Telegraph reported that his birth name was Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. In 2018 Reuters reported something different, saying his real name was Ibrahim al-Samarrai. Reporters were still guessing about the most basic fact of his identity years after he became famous.

  The name the world knows is a pseudonym. His kunya, or teknonym, was Abu Bakr, which means "father of a young camel." He is thought to have chosen it to echo the first caliph, Abu Bakr. In Sunni tradition that earlier Abu Bakr stood in as prayer leader when Muhammad was ill. The surname al-Baghdadi means "the one from Baghdad," pointing to the city or the surrounding governorate.

  Other labels followed him. Some called him ash-Shabah, meaning the phantom or ghost. Others used Invisible Sheikh or Sheikh Baghdadi. He was also Abu Du'a, a name built on the word for supplications and prayers. Further aliases included Abdullah al-Nasir, Abdul Sami and Abu Bakr al-Ansari. In regions under his group's control, honorifics that treated him as a noble and a head of state could precede or follow his name.

  The real man was born on the 28th of July 1971 in Samarra, which gave him the nisba al-Samarra'i. His family was Sunni Arab and belonged to the Al-Bu Badri tribe, which supplied the second nisba, al-Badri. He later claimed descent from the Quraysh tribe, and so a link to Muhammad, but nothing backed the claim. He was the third of four sons of Awwad Ibrahim, a religious cleric who began as a teacher leading neighbourhood children in reciting the Quran.

  A short semi-authorized biography by Abu Humam al-Athari says his grandfather, Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, lived to about 94 and saw the American occupation. Both father and grandfather were said to be farmers. His mother's name is unknown, though she was described as devout and notable in the tribe. One uncle served in Saddam Hussein's security services, and one brother became an officer in the Iraqi Army. Another brother probably died in either the Iran-Iraq War or the Gulf War. Even in youth, the boy was described as extremely conservative and religious. His school record, however, would show a less impressive side.

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• 3. The Quiet Scholar

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  Official records from Samarra High School show that al-Baghdadi had to retake his high school certificate in 1991. He scored 481 out of a possible 600 points. A few months later the Iraqi military judged him unfit for service because of his nearsightedness. His grades fell short of what he needed to study law, educational science or languages at the University of Baghdad.

  It is believed he went instead to the Islamic University of Baghdad, now called Iraqi University. There he studied Islamic law and later the Quran. A biography that circulated on extremist internet forums in July 2013 claimed he earned a BA, an MA and a PhD in Islamic studies there. Another report says his doctorate was in education from the University of Baghdad.

  The scholar Will McCants offers the most detailed account. He says al-Baghdadi successfully defended his doctoral thesis in 2007, despite the weight of his new responsibilities as a militant. The work edited a medieval manuscript by Muhammad al-Samarqandi, who died in Baghdad in 1378. The manuscript is an Arabic poem about the rules of Quran recitation, and the thesis earned a grade of "very good."

  For more than a decade, until 2004, al-Baghdadi lived in a room attached to a small mosque in Tobchi. Tobchi is a poor neighbourhood on the western fringes of Baghdad, home to both Shia and Sunni Muslims. Residents and contemporaries told the Daily Telegraph he was shy and unimpressive, a religious scholar who avoided violence.

  Later, analysts noted how useful that blank past became. Patrick Skinner of the Soufan Group said officials know physically who the man is, but "his backstory is just myth." Patrick Johnston of the RAND Corporation said he "managed this secret persona extremely well," and added that "young people are really attracted to that." In March 2003 the American invasion of Iraq arrived, and it was about to change everything around that small room in Tobchi.

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• 4. Prison to Emir

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  The writings of the Egyptian jihadist scholar Sayyid Qutb strongly influenced al-Baghdadi around the time of the 2003 invasion. How he turned militant is disputed. Some believe he became a revolutionary under Saddam Hussein. Other reports say he was radicalized by joining the Muslim Brotherhood as a youth, or later while interned with al-Qaeda commanders. He may have been a mosque cleric when the invasion began. Afterward he helped found a militant group, Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah, and became its head.

  In early February 2004, American forces arrested him near Fallujah. He had been visiting the home of an old student friend, Nessayif Numan Nessayif, who was also on the American wanted list. He was held at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca as a civilian internee under the name Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry. His detainee card listed his profession as "administrative work (secretary)." The Defense Department placed him in Compound 6, a medium security Sunni compound.

  On the 8th of December 2004, he was released as a "low level" prisoner after the Combined Review and Release Board recommended it. Some newspapers and news channels claimed instead that he was held from 2005 to 2009. Those reports trace to an interview with Colonel Kenneth King, a former Camp Bucca commander, and Defense Department records do not support them. What is established is that Camp Bucca held other future leaders of the Islamic State at the same time.

  His rise began in 2006, when his group joined the Mujahideen Shura Council and he sat on its sharia committee. When the council became the Islamic State of Iraq that year, he became general supervisor of its sharia committee. He also joined its senior consultative council. On the 16th of May 2010, the group announced him as its leader, following the death of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

  The violence under his command grew quickly. Between March and April 2011, the group claimed 23 attacks south of Baghdad. After Osama bin Laden's death on the 2nd of May 2011, al-Baghdadi praised the al-Qaeda founder and threatened retaliation. On the 5th of May the group claimed an attack in Hilla that killed 24 policemen and wounded 72. The United States State Department offered a reward of 10 million dollars for him from 2011, later raised to 25 million in 2017.

  In August 2011, a wave of suicide attacks beginning in Mosul killed 70 people. Later that month, a suicide bombing at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad killed the prominent Sunni lawmaker Khalid al-Fahdawi. The group pledged 100 attacks across Iraq. On the 22nd of December 2011, coordinated car bombings and explosive attacks hit over a dozen Baghdad neighbourhoods, killing at least 63 and wounding 180. They came just days after the American troop withdrawal. The group claimed responsibility on the 26th of December.

  On the 2nd of December 2012, Iraqi officials announced they had captured him in Baghdad. The group rejected the claim. Iraq's Acting Interior Minister admitted on the 7th of December that the man was only a sectional commander in charge of an area from Baghdad's northern outskirts to Taji. The real al-Baghdadi was still free.

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• 5. Caliph Ibrahim

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  On the 8th of April 2013, al-Baghdadi announced the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. He declared that Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadist faction in the Syrian civil war, was an extension of his group and would now merge into it. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, disputed the merger. He appealed to al-Qaeda's emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who ruled that the new group should be abolished and that al-Baghdadi should stay in Iraq.

  Al-Baghdadi dismissed the ruling. He reportedly took control of 80 percent of Jabhat al-Nusra's foreign fighters. In January 2014 his forces expelled Jabhat al-Nusra from the Syrian city of Raqqa. Clashes that same month in Deir ez-Zor Governorate killed hundreds of fighters and displaced tens of thousands of civilians. In February 2014, al-Qaeda cut all ties with the group. Several Western sources said the group received private funding from citizens of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and recruited fighters there.

  On the 29th of June 2014, the group declared a worldwide caliphate, named al-Baghdadi as caliph, and renamed itself the Islamic State. He took the title "Caliph Ibrahim." A "Shura Council" was said to have chosen him, made up of members supposedly qualified to elect a caliph. Middle Eastern governments, other jihadist groups, and Sunni theologians and historians sharply criticized the move. The Qatar-based theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi called the declaration "void under sharia" with "dangerous consequences for the Sunnis in Iraq and for the revolt in Syria." He added that the title can "only be given by the entire Muslim nation."

  Tradition holds that a caliph who fails the obligations of the sunnah must step down, and that the community then selects the most pious person available. Because so many rejected his claim, his status has been compared with that of other caliphs whose legitimacy was questioned.

  A video shows him on a pulpit at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, speaking in Arabic at the first Friday prayer of Ramadan. The footage is dated the 4th of July 2014. He declares himself caliph and calls on Muslims worldwide to support him. An Iraqi government representative called the video a "farce." The BBC and the Associated Press, however, quoted unnamed Iraqi officials who believed the man was al-Baghdadi. In an audio message he vowed that his followers would march on "Rome," generally read as meaning the West. He said he would conquer both Rome and Spain, and urged Muslims everywhere to move to the new state.

  Under his leadership the group directed the mass use of suicide bombings and the execution of prisoners. It carried out the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq, along with organized rape, extensive sexual slavery and systematic executions. Its propaganda videos displayed some of these acts. American authorities accused al-Baghdadi himself of kidnapping, enslaving and repeatedly raping the American hostage Kayla Mueller. The group later alleged that a Jordanian airstrike killed her, but she is believed to have been executed by the group.

  On the 8th of July 2014 the group launched an online magazine called Dabiq, a title that seemed chosen for its link to the Islamic version of the end times. The Islamic State briefly captured substantial territory in Iraq and Syria. During his time as caliph, it lost all of that land and almost all of its fighters.

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• 6. Voice and Rumor

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  In October 2014, one report claimed al-Baghdadi was seriously injured and had fled Raqqa for Mosul to escape coalition bombing. On the 7th of November came unconfirmed reports that an airstrike in Mosul had killed him, while others said he was only wounded. Six days later, the group released a 17-minute audio message in his claimed voice. In it he vowed that fighters would not stop "even if only one soldier remains," and urged supporters to "erupt volcanoes of jihad" around the world.

  The pattern repeated for years. On the 8th of February 2015, after Jordan reportedly carried out 56 airstrikes that killed 7,000 militants in three days, he was said to have fled Raqqa for Mosul. A Peshmerga source then told the coalition he was there, and warplanes bombed known leadership meeting sites for two hours. On the 18th of March 2015, an airstrike near the Syrian border in al-Baaj was reported to have seriously wounded him. Top leaders supposedly met to discuss a successor, and by the 22nd of April Iraqi sources said Abu Ala al-Afri was filling in. The Defense Department said, "we have no reason to believe it was Baghdadi." The Guardian reported a spinal injury that might leave him paralyzed.

  The group answered with another audio message on the 14th of May 2015, urging Muslims to migrate to its territory. On the 20th of July, the New York Times wrote that rumors of his death or injury had been "dispelled." Claims kept coming. Iraq said it bombed his convoy in October 2015. Iraqi State TV reported him wounded in June 2016, and other outlets claimed him dead days later, a report the Independent later linked to a digitally altered image. In October 2016, outlets said he and three senior leaders had been poisoned but survived. A 23-minute message appeared in December 2015, and another on the 2nd of November 2016 urged forces to defend Mosul.

  In April 2017, media reports said Syrian and Russian forces had arrested him, which the Russian Foreign Ministry said it knew nothing about. In June 2017 Russian media said an airstrike near Raqqa on the 28th of May had killed him along with hundreds of fighters. Monitoring groups found 17 or 18 civilian deaths and possibly ten fighters from the strike. The United States doubted the claim. Iran's official news agency quoted a Quds Force representative saying he was "definitely dead," and then removed the quotation. In July 2017 the Kurdish counter-terrorism official Lahur Talabany told Reuters he was "99 percent" sure al-Baghdadi was alive.

  He was alive. A 46-minute recording released through the group's media arm Al Furqan on the 28th of September 2017 mentioned the recapture of Mosul, apparently to quash the death rumors. He called for attacks on Western media centers. The next message came on the 23rd of August 2018, on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, titled "Glad Tidings to the Steadfast." It urged followers to persevere through heavy losses and ended the speculation about his death.

  On the 29th of April 2019, an 18-minute video showed him with an assault rifle, his first public appearance in almost five years. He mentioned the loss of the group's last territory at Baghuz Fawqani, the Sri Lanka Easter bombings, and the overthrow of the Sudanese and Algerian presidents. That suggested the video was filmed about a week before release. His final recording came on the 16th of September 2019, calling on followers to free detained members and their families from camps in Iraq and Syria.

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• 7. Hiding in Plain Sight

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  Until the summer of 2017, the Islamic State was believed to be headquartered in a series of buildings in Raqqa. American rules of engagement made those buildings off-limits as targets because civilians lived next to them. US intelligence believed al-Baghdadi kept a low profile among the civilian population. Photos of a possible public appearance in a Fallujah mosque surfaced in February 2016. Colonel John Dorrian of the Combined Joint Task Force said al-Baghdadi was known to sleep in a suicide vest in case of capture.

  By 2018, Iraqi intelligence officials and some experts thought he was hiding in Hajin, then the group's de facto capital in Syria's Middle Euphrates Valley. No direct evidence placed him there, but the remaining leadership was concentrated in the town. The Syrian Democratic Forces captured Hajin on the 14th of December 2018, and his whereabouts stayed unknown. On the 1st of February 2019, Abu Ali al-Basri of Iraq's Interior Ministry said al-Baghdadi never stayed in one place and slipped across the border through Anbar and Salaheddine. The analyst Fadhel Abu Rageef described him roaming without convoys or phones, with "a simple car, and just a driver."

  A Yazidi woman held as his slave told the Associated Press that he had tried to flee to Idlib in late 2017 with a wife and his guards. He turned back out of fear of an attempt on his life. She said he spent a week in Hajin, then four months at Dashisha, in the home of his father-in-law Abu Abdullah al-Zubaie. He moved only at night, in disguise, with five guards. She last met him in the spring of 2018.

  His brother-in-law Mohamad Ali Sajit gave Al Arabiya a portrait of the final months. Sajit said al-Baghdadi was "a nervous wreck" who often suspected IS governors of betrayal. He traveled with five to seven confidants, and only one of them, Abul-Hasan al-Muhajir, used a mobile phone. Al-Baghdadi always carried a suicide vest, ordered others to do the same, and sometimes dressed as a shepherd. Once he had to be hidden in a pit to avoid a possible raid. His diabetes worsened under the strain, and he did not fast during Ramadan or let his associates do so. Al-Zubaie was killed in March 2019.

  His family trail also drew attention. Sujidah al-Dulaimi was released from a Syrian jail in March 2014 in a swap of 150 women for 13 nuns captured by al-Qaeda-linked militants. Lebanese authorities arrested her in late November 2014 with her children, traveling on false documents. Lebanon's interior minister, Nohad Machnouk, said she had been briefly married to al-Baghdadi years earlier. He said DNA testing showed her daughter was his. In 2018, his son Hudhayfah al-Badri was killed in an attack on Syrian and Russian forces in Homs Governorate. A Western intelligence agent said his brother Jumah, a courier for him, was deliberately left free so he might lead them to al-Baghdadi.

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• 8. The Barisha Raid

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  On the 27th of October 2019, helicopters carrying American special forces crossed airspace controlled by Russia and Turkey and headed for Idlib province in northwestern Syria. The force included the Delta Force, soldiers of the 75th Ranger Regiment, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Intelligence from the CIA's Special Activities Division had located the Islamic State's leader. The operation took place as American forces were withdrawing from northeast Syria.

  President Donald Trump and his officials said military dogs hunted al-Baghdadi until he was cornered in a tunnel. There he detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and three young children, reportedly his own. General Frank McKenzie, commander of US Central Command, later revised the number of children to two. The blast injured two Delta operators and a military working dog named Conan, though none of the injuries threatened life. Trump said: "He died like a dog. He died like a coward. The world is now a much safer place." Reports said two of his wives also died wearing vests that had not detonated, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed.

  Trump thanked Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and the Syrian Kurdish forces for their support. Turkey's Defence Ministry confirmed it had exchanged and coordinated information with American authorities before the attack. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, declined to say whether Russia had been told in advance. Russia had earlier claimed to have killed al-Baghdadi in a Raqqa airstrike on the 28th of May 2017.

  DNA profiling was done at once to confirm his identity. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said the disposal of the remains was complete and "handled appropriately." Milley first said no images would be released, but showed footage of the raid at a briefing on the 30th of October. Three anonymous American officials and General McKenzie said the body was buried at sea with Islamic funeral rites.

  The question of who would take over had already been muddled. In September 2019, a statement credited to the Amaq News Agency named Abdullah Qardash as successor. Analysts called it a fabrication, and Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence noted its font differed from earlier Amaq statements. On the 29th of October, Trump said al-Baghdadi's "number one replacement" had also been killed. A US official later said he meant Abul-Hasan al-Muhajir, killed in an American airstrike in Syria two days earlier. On the 31st of October, the group confirmed al-Baghdadi's death on Telegram and named Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi as his replacement.

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