Al Baghdadi’s death does little to resolve the issues behind his climb to power

The death of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi does little to mitigate the factors behind his rise and may even lead to more sophisticated versions of the militancy he espoused.

His killing could lessen ISIS’s global appeal but in Syria and Iraq, site of the group’s destroyed caliphate, Al Baghdadi’s following was down to ideology, and societal and political imbalances caused by poor governance and statebacked discrimination.

US President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that US troops killed the ISIS leader in a raid on a compound in the northern Syrian governorate of Idlib.

Idlib is largely controlled by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, a rebranded version of an Al Qaeda offshoot called Jabhat Al Nusra.

Al Qaeda also spawned ISIS as it changed into more localised versions after the US overran the group’s Afghanistan base in retaliation for the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Al Nusra capitalised on a violent Sunni backlash to the crackdown on the 2011 uprising against Assad family rule to attract recruits.

It and ISIS have been foes for years, competing over turf, resources and leadership of the ideological discourse.

But Al Baghdadi was killed in a sector of Idlib reportedly run by a pragmatist faction, indicating that former foes may have given him refuge.

This faction, led by Iraqi commander Abu Marya Al Qahtani, had not shied away from co-operation with ISIS, even though he argued for building support by winning over local communities rather than relying on brute force.

Al Qahtani said that ISIS’s inclusion of former Saddam Hussein henchmen and its avoidance of confrontation with the Syrian regime of President Bashar Al Assad was hurting the overall militant cause.

This suggests that an ISIS 2.0 could learn from its past.

Al Qaeda had given way in Iraq to a version led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who had fewer qualms about promoting indiscriminate violence than the group’s original leaders.

Al Zarqawi sought to sabotage the Shiite political ascendency in Iraq, which many Sunnis believe took place at their expense and to the advantage of Iran after the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Hussein, under whom the Shiite majority were repressed.

A US raid killed Al Zarqawi in central Iraq. Many Sunnis came to the conclusion that Al Qaeda’s excesses in Iraq were damaging their chances of survival, helping to form the USbacked Sunni brigades known as Al Sahwat that eventually defeated Al Zarqawi’s faction.

After US forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the government moved against Al Sahwat and cracked down on Sunni protests, which contributed to the emergence of ISIS.

ISIS captured Mosul in 2014 and invaded parts of Syria, focusing more on taking territory from rebels and from Kurdish militia that had overrun Arab tribal regions, than on fighting Mr Al Assad’s forces.

Mr Al Assad is from Syria’s Alawite minority, comprising 10 per cent of the country’s pre-2011 population.

Even so, his intelligence apparatus helped Sunni militants to cross into Iraq to fight US forces and the government there after 2003.

Early in the Syrian revolt in 2011, Mr Assad released the militants he had jailed under US pressure after they returned from Iraq. Many of them went on to become commanders in Al Nusra and ISIS.

From the moment he appeared in the pulpit of a Mosul mosque in 2014, Al Baghdadi portrayed himself as fulfilling an ideology that dictates a caliphate.

He presented himself as the leader of all Muslims, even though the focus of his group had been the killing of Iraqi Shiites, civilians and combatants alike.

He used humble language to assure that ISIS’s rule would be just.

After the reign of terror that followed, there are few in Iraq and Syria who will mourn Al Baghdadi’s demise.

But their grievances are as present now as the day he climbed that pulpit in Mosul.

Al Baghdadi presented himself as the leader of all Muslims despite his group killing combatant and civilian Iraqi Shiites