Where is IS chief Baghdadi?
Questions over elusive leader’s whereabouts as his ‘caliphate’ ends
BAGHDAD: The world’s most wanted man who has so far eluded capture, Islamic State group chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has seen his “caliphate” crumble and its last shred of territory in Syria evaporate.
After declaring himself caliph in 2014, Baghdadi held sway over seven million people across swathes of Syria and Iraq, where IS implemented its brutal version of Islamic law.
But that land has been whittled down to disjointed sleeper cells by years of fighting, including a ferocious bombing campaign by the US-led coalition.
Reclusive even when IS was at the peak of its power, the 47-yearold Iraqi, who suffers from diabetes, has been rumoured to have been wounded or killed several times in the past. And his whereabouts have never been confirmed.
So, with his proto-state gone and a US$25mil (RM101mil) bounty on his head, where is Baghdadi?
“He only has three companions: his older brother Jumaa, his driver and bodyguard Abdullatif al-Jubury, whom he has known since childhood, and his courier Saud al-Kurdi,” said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi specialist in IS.
Hashemi said the quartet is likely laying low somewhere in Syria’s vast Badia desert, which stretches from the eastern border with Iraq to the sweeping province of Homs.
But as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces pressed the “final battle” against IS’ last sliver of territory, a spokesman for the US-backed group said the elusive leader was likely not there.
“We do not think he is in Syria,” Mustafa Bali said, without elaborating further.
Born Ibrahim Awad al-Badri in 1971, the passionate football fan came from modest beginnings in Samarra, north of Baghdad.
His high school results were not good enough for law school and his poor eyesight prevented him from joining the army, so he moved to the Baghdad district of Tobchi to study Islam. After US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, he founded his own insurgent organisation but never carried out major attacks.
When he was arrested and held in a US detention facility in southern Iraq in February 2004, he was still very much a second- or thirdtier militant.
But it was Camp Bucca – later dubbed “the University of Jihad” – where Baghdadi came of age as a militant.
He was released at the end of 2004 for lack of evidence. Iraqi security services arrested him twice subsequently, in 2007 and 2012, but let him go because they did not know who he was.
In 2005, he pledged allegiance to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the brutal leader of Iraq’s Al-Qaeda franchise.
Zarqawi was killed by an American drone strike in 2006, and after his successor was also eliminated, Baghdadi took the helm in 2010. He revived the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), expanded into Syria in 2013 and declared independence from Al-Qaeda.
In the following years, Baghdadi’s Islamic State group captured swathes of territory, set up a brutal system of government, and inspired thousands to join the “caliphate” from abroad.