From the moment in July 2014 when he ascended the minbar (pulpit) in a mosque in Mosul, clad in black robes, to claim the title of caliph of the Muslim world, until his death on Sunday during a raid by US forces, Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was the most wanted and feared man on the planet.
In less time than it had taken any terrorist leader before him, he and his organisation, Islamic State (Isis), had successfully provoked upheaval across the Middle East and stirred trepidation around the globe. To many, Baghdadi was the sum of all fears, a man who had been transported straight from the savage early wars of Islamic history to the modern battlefields of the region nearly 1,500 years later.
As he delivered his sermon that day, Baghdadi deliberately invoked past caliphates, in particular the Abbasid era (AD750-1517), which is often referred to as the Islamic Golden Age. Baghdadi believed that he could trace his lineage back to the prophet Muhammad, and that his postgraduate Islamic studies had earned him a place among Islam’s historical figures.
He also believed that his deeds in Iraq and Syria, and the violent cause he was leading, had outperformed the contemporary jihadist leaders who had come before him, including Osama bin Laden, and Baghdadi’s immediate predecessors in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Possessed of a sense of destiny that bordered on narcissism, Baghdadi was convinced he could topple the new regime in Baghdad, restore old ways in which Islam was practised, settle a 1,500-year-old score with the rival Islamic sect, the Shias, and help fulfil prophecies that edged the world towards an inevitable end of days showdown with a pre-ordained foe.
Before he proclaimed himself Caliph Ibrahim, leader of the Islamic State across a swathe of land the size of Jordan, that straddled the Iraqi and Syrian borders, Baghdadi had spent the best part of a decade of his life preparing for such a day.
He was one of six children born in the Iraqi city of Samarra, to a father from the al-Samarrai family, pious Sunnis, and his wife, Aliaa Hussain Ali. His friends had seen no early sign that he would end up leading a virulent Sunni jihad that aimed to address modern grievances by reverting to the values and traditions of seventh-century Islamic life.
In 2002 he earned a master’s, followed in 2006 by a PhD in Islamic studies, from Saddam University (now Nahrain University) in Baghdad. But little else is known about Baghdadi’s life until early 2004, when he was arrested nearly a year after the US invasion of Iraq in a friend’s house in Fallujah.
From Camp Bucca, the US-run prison in southern Iraq where he would spend nine months, the man who would later force a reluctant Barack Obama to return US forces to Iraq began his decade-long quest for power. An inmate who spent time in the notorious prison said Baghdadi was initially an unassuming figure who steadily built authority by acting as an arbitrator in the jail. He won the trust of his captors, who could not establish that the man they had captured had abiding ties to the Sunni-led anti-US insurgency that was fast gathering steam on the country’s restive streets.
The ousting of Saddam Hussein had robbed Iraq’s Sunnis of a power base. Sunnis are the smaller of the two Muslim sects in Iraq, and when Saddam fell the more dominant Shias took power, forming an alliance with Shia Islamic Iran and, with US backing, removing the Sunni- dominated Ba’ath party from all aspects of Iraqi life.
Within one year of Baghdadi’s release, though, things changed. He joined the Mujahideen Shura Council, a coalition of various insurgent groups, and became an insurgent leader in central Iraq.
Through the darkest years of the civil war, he steadily rose through the ranks of the insurgency, which had begun to take a more central leadership structure. By the time he took the reins, the group was called the Islamic State of Iraq. It had ties to Bin Laden’s al-Qaida and remained a potent threat to the Shia-led government of post-Saddam Iraq.
That is where things might have stayed, had it not been for the Arab awakenings, a series of revolts that reverberated around the Arab world from early 2011, eventually arriving in Syria, where the fallout was to rip the country, and the region, apart.
As the Syrian police state crumbled and a popular armed opposition rose, then splintered, an opportunity emerged for Baghdadi to amplify the rumbling insurgency in Iraq. By mid-2012, he had moved jihadists into Syria, and from later that year until mid-2013, a core group of Iraqi insurgent leaders steadily organised into what would soon be the most potent terrorist force in the Middle East – with the possible exception of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In April 2013, when Baghdadi’s forces deemed themselves ready, they announced that the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (Isis) was to oust another jihadist group, Jabhat al-Nusra. And from then on, the centre of the Arab world descended steadily into a brutal Hobbesian reality of fear, relentless violence and the draconian implementation of Islamic law and customs.
Several hundred of its men ousted five divisions of the Iraqi army in June 2014, giving the group the country’s second biggest city, Mosul, as well as Saddam’s birthplace, Tikrit, and most of the border with Syria. Minorities were soon on the run, and coexistence all but ended on the ancient plains of Nineveh in Iraq’s north-west where Sunnis, Christians, Yazidis and Shia Turkmen had lived alongside each other for millennia.
This was the scale of purge that Bin Laden and other jihadist pioneers had talked about in fire and brimstone warnings to which few in the region, or in Europe and the US, had paid heed. Here, though, was a figure who could deliver on worst-case scenarios that he and his acolytes had chillingly predicted.
The very order of the post-Ottoman region remains at stake. So too do the gulf monarchies, global energy supplies and societies far beyond the boiling Middle East to where some of the Isis jihadists are bound to return.
Baghdadi had a leading hand in much of the disorder that the region has witnessed since early 2013. No single figure caused more chaos in such a short time. In his formative years, he spoke in sermons at university and to growing bands of followers of his time on earth as being a small step in a long journey that would continue well beyond the grave. He eulogised Bin Laden when he was killed by US forces in 2011 and had clearly anticipated a similar fate for himself. His legacy is one of destruction and division. His deeds will reverberate for decades to come.
Baghdadi is thought to have been married three times. Three of his children died with him when he detonated a suicide vest as US forces pursued him.
• Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai), insurgent leader, born 1971; died 27 October 2019
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