Why has IS chief appeared after a 5-year absence?

BEIRUT: An Islamic State group video purporting to show supremo Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi for the first time in five years may herald a new chapter for the jihadists, according to experts. The release of the video Monday addresses key issues for IS, analysts said, as the jihadists look ahead following the collapse of their socalled caliphate.

Why now?

Baghdadi has been laying low for years-earning him the nickname “The Ghost”-and his whereabouts have never been confirmed. His last voice recording to his supporters was released in August, eight months after Iraq announced it had defeated IS and as the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces closed in on the jihadists in neighboring Syria. Monday’s video, released one month after the IS proto-state was declared defeated, “comes at a crucially important time,” said Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in the United States.

IS is emerging from a “territorial defeat in its Syria-Iraq heartlands, and (is) attempting to re-assert itself as a global movement capable of conducting major attacks around the world,” he said. Pieter Nanninga, from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said the difficulties facing IS explains the timing. Baghdadi wants “to boost morale of his supporters by showing that IS is still a powerful group.”

A new era?

In the video released by IS’s AlFurqan media arm, the man said to be Baghdadi acknowledged “the battle for Baghouz is over”. The fight for IS’s final redoubt in the Syrian village of Baghouz ended in March. In a segment in which the man is not on camera, his voice describes the April 21 attacks in Sri Lanka, which killed 253 people and wounded nearly 500, as “vengeance for their brothers in Baghouz.” He insisted IS’s operations against the West were part of a “long battle,” and that IS would continue to “take revenge” for members who had been killed. Amarnath Amarasingam, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said Baghdadi’s speech served to “contextualise... or make sense of the defeat,” of the IS proto-state.

“That was largely the point of the speech-to show that they are going through a transition period, (and that) the defeat is real, that there is focus on places outside of Syria and Iraq in the next few months,” he said. Charlie Winter, a researcher at King’s College London, said that Baghdadi wants to demonstrate that the influence of the group’s extremist ideology remains dangerously intact even after the collapse of its so-called caliphate. “Baghdadi wants to show that if the territory has been lost, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “The ideology has been globalised in a manner that was never possible before.”

At the peak of its military success, IS claimed a string of attacks around the world, from the November 2015 coordinated attacks in Paris to the deadly rampage of a gunman at an Istanbul nightclub minutes into 2017. The latest video demonstrates that the risk of attacks anywhere in the world remains just as high, even after the territorial defeat of the group.