Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the leader of the Islamic State group who brought terror to the heart of Europe and set up a short-lived organization so extreme that it was shunned even by al-Qaida. He was killed Saturday by U.S. forces in Syria.
FILE - This file image made from video posted on a militant website April 29, 2019, purports to show the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, being interviewed by his group's Al-Furqan media outlet. The IS erupted from the chaos of Syria and Iraq's conflicts and swiftly did what no Islamic militant group had done before, conquering a giant stretch of territory and declaring itself a "caliphate." U.S. officials said late Saturday, Oct.
Militants under his command were some of the first jihadis to grow up with the internet, and they deftly exploited social media to tout their military successes, document their mass slaughter, beheadings and stonings, and promote the Islamic State to a global audience.and five years after the group humiliated its armed forces and seized nearly a third of the country.
Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the IS spokesman and one of the group’s best known commanders, was also said to have been killed in 2016 by a Russian airstrike. Al-Zarqawi was killed by U.S. forces in an airstrike north of Baghdad in 2006 and al-Baghdadi became a trusted aide of its two most senior figures, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri. Al-Baghdadi assumed control of the group, known at the time as the Islamic State of Iraq.
Over time, more of his fighters and possibly al-Baghdadi himself relocated to Syria, pursuing their plans to restore a medieval Islamic state, or caliphate, spanning both Iraq and greater Syria, also known as the Levant. In April 2013, al-Baghdadi announced what amounted to a hostile takeover of the Nusra Front, saying he was merging it into a new group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The move caught both the Nusra Front and al-Qaida’s central command off guard.
Then came the offensive that would draw the U.S. back into Iraq. In June 2014, al-Baghdadi’s militants and allied Sunni fighters seized Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul and other Sunni-dominated communities in the north and west of the country. Government troops in many areas put up little resistance, abandoning their posts and leaving behind valuable American-made materiel. Al-Baghdadi’s fighters posted propaganda videos of its forces gunning down captured Shiite troops en masse.
President Barack Obama launched airstrikes against IS beginning Aug. 8. He acted after thousands of Iraqi Yazidis, followers of an ancient religion with ties to Zoroastrianism, were targeted by al-Baghdadi’s fighters and in order to safeguard U.S. interests, including a consulate in the Iraqi Kurdish regional capital of Irbil.
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