Al-Baghdadi ‘The Ghost’: Low-profile boss of terror network

BAGHDAD: Discreet in his youth and invisible as the world’s most wanted man, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi rose through the ranks quietly and patiently to become the global terror network’s undisputed supremo.

The reclusive terrorist chief made his only known public appearance as “caliph” at Friday prayers at the Grand Mosque of Al-Nuri in Mosul.

That appearance made the mosque a symbol of Daesh rule, and the terrorists did not allow it to be captured intact, blowing it and its famed leaning minaret up in June as Iraqi forces closed in.

The 46-year-old Iraqi-born leader of Daesh, nicknamed “The Ghost,” has not been seen in public since his 2014 visit to the mosque, and the fortunes of his “caliphate” have since made a drastic turn for the worse.

He has been rumored wounded or killed a number of times in the past, and while he was said to have left Mosul earlier this year, his whereabouts were never confirmed.

His low profile — a perfect antithesis to Osama Bin Laden — is partly what Al-Baghdadi, who has a $25-million US bounty on his head, has owed his rise as well as his survival to.

The man who in 2014 became the overlord of a terrorist state ruling over millions of inhabitants was born Ibrahim Awad Al-Badri to a modest family in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Al-Baghdadi’s high school results were too modest to undertake a law degree and his eyesight too bad to join the army so he moved to the capital to study religion, settling in the neighborhood of Tobchi.

After US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, he founded his own insurgent outfit.

It never carried out major attacks, however, and by the time he was arrested