Al-Baghdadi: The Terrorist Who Keeps Dying

DURING THE HORRIFIC attack on a gay nightclub in the US, the shooter Omar Mateen called up a police helpline and reportedly revealed his allegiance to the leader of the terrorist organisation ISIS. A few days later came a rumour of the death of that leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but no one is in a hurry to believe it. Over time, there have been several unverified reports of his death or injury, and in one case, even paralysis from a supposed spinal injury. This time, the rumours say he was injured in a US airstrike on 14 June. And Amaq , a news agency which is believed to be linked with the Islamic State, has reported, as per some news reports, that Al-Baghdadi has succumbed to his injuries. The US government has, however, refused to confirm the death. A US military spokesman in Baghdad told Fox News, “We have seen these types of reports before, here in Iraq and in other operations, and until we have confirmation, we are going to practice healthy scepticism.”

Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed ‘caliph’ who has changed the nature of terrorism, whose call for allegiance to him and violence against non-believers has been answered by thousands from various parts of the world, is a mysterious and shadowy figure. He rarely appears in public. Very few at any given point of time know where he is located. His name is a nom de guerre. It is believed that his real name is Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri. He even wears a mask, according to some reports, to address his commanders.

Most of the information about Al-Baghdadi is of the time before he became ISIS’s chief. He is believed to have been born in 1971, in Samarra, north of Baghdad. Some claim he became a militant jihadist during the Saddam Hussein regime. Many others believe he was a cleric in a Baghdad mosque during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. After the invasion, he helped found a militant group, Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah. He was arrested and held at a US facility in southern Iraq for some time and later released as a ‘low level prisoner’. Al-Baghdadi rose to prominence when he became the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the groups that later became ISIS, and later when he defied Al- Qaeda’s chief Ayman al-Zawahiri and attempted to merge his faction with the Al-Nusra Front in Syria.

As the head of ISIS, Al-Baghdadi has in a very short time completely changed the nature of terrorism. Not only has his call, especially in cyberspace, been answered by millions, he has changed terrorist targets from symbolic structures and institutions to just about anything. He has ensured that anyone sympathetic to ISIS doctrines—without necessarily being a member of the organisation or being linked to any terrorist cell, thereby ruling out the efficacy of surveillance—can pledge allegiance to the organisation on a public platform and then carry out an attack on civilians, including women and children. He has orchestrated attacks on a wide variety of places, from a football match attended by the French president and a Russian commercial plane to a Tunisian museum and resort and attacks on Paris.

There is reason for the secrecy surrounding him. After all, one of his predecessors, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in 2006 after his secret location was tracked down. Al-Baghdadi, for all one knows, may already be dead. But just the image—of the caliph of a supposed Islamic State, one that attracts the unhinged and the barbaric and spooks the rest of the sane world—may be worth ISIS’s while to keep alive for propaganda.

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