The Terrorist Caliph as Nation Builder in Iraq, Syria, and Beyond

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The Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, always several steps behind, scrambled to deny the video’s authenticity.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: The Daily Beast
By Jamie Dettmer | July 7, 2014

Jihadist troops and administrative smarts make the leader of the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’ a threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but in Palestine and the Gulf.

He came out of the shadows dressed in black to deliver a 20-minute sermon to the people he claims to command—a billion Muslims around the globe—and to urge them to help build a caliphate in the heart of the Arab world. By any standards Friday’s video appearance by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the head of the al Qaeda breakaway faction he calls the Islamic State, was both subversive and audacious.

Of course, the elusive 42-year-old “Caliph Ibrahim,” as he now styles himself, had to make an appearance sometime, to show himself to his people—notwithstanding the $10 million bounty on his head and U.S. drones no doubt flying in the skies above the Grand Mosque of Mosul where he spoke.

In 2010 he forbade his followers to show any images of him, but the appearance of the man who would be king at communal prayers points to al Baghdadi’s confidence in his control over Iraq’s second-largest city, which was captured less than a month ago by his fighters.

“He is asserting his leadership,” says Raffaello Pantucci, a terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. And as Bruce Riedel of Brookings points out, the symbolism surrounding his declaration, from his choice of venue to the adoption of his name, was calculated to evoke memories of the vast Abbasid empire in the Middle Ages while giving “Ibrahim,” or Abraham, claims to “his” city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia and to Palestine, as well as to Baghdad and the desert lands he’s conquered in Syria and Iraq.

The Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, always several steps behind, scrambled to deny the video’s authenticity. Baghdad officials claimed the self-proclaimed caliph was wounded in an air strike days earlier. “We have analyzed the footage, and found it a farce,” an Interior Ministry spokesman declared.

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