The Daily - The Life and Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

After a five-year international manhunt, the leader of the Islamic State, who at one point controlled a caliphate the size of Britain, was killed in a raid by elite United States forces in Syria over the weekend.Today, we explore the life and death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — and the legacy he leaves behind. Guest: Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism and the Islamic State for The Times, in conversation with Natalie Kitroeff. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Kurdish forces were essential in the mission to track and identify Mr. al-Baghdadi. President Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from northern Syria threw the operation into turmoil.Some survivors of Islamic State brutality said Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death came too late. “He deserves a worse and more abhorrent death,” one added.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the life and death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. My colleague, Natalie Kitcherov, talks to Rukmini Kalamaki about the man who created ISIS. about the man who created ISIS. It's Tuesday, October 29th. Rukmini, who was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the caliph of the Islamic State. He was the leader of this terrorist group that at its height controlled territory the size of Great Britain in Iraq and Syria, that drew in tens of thousands of recruits from 100 countries, 40,000 we believe, and that succeeded in carrying out attacks not just in Iraq and Syria, not just in Paris and Brussels, but in a total of, at the last count, I had 40 different countries around the world. So how does one become that? How do you become the leader of a caliphate? What my reporting has shown is that it's actually not what people say it was. People think that he was radicalized at Camp Bucca in the year 2004, which is right after the US-led invasion of Iraq,

when Baghdadi is picked up in a raid that was in fact aiming to get his brother-in-law. He is taken to an American facility, Camp Bucca. And in Camp Bucca, the theory goes, he rubbed shoulders with the future leaders of the insurgency. And it was there that he became radicalized through those people and through his hatred of the American occupiers. This has been out in biographies of Baghdadi, said by the top analysts who are in this field. But in fact, when you go and speak to the people who were incarcerated with him, you realize that he showed up already radicalized. So in order to understand who he is,

you have to back up and you have to go to, I would say, his childhood and his teenage years. And what was his childhood like? He came from a modest family from a village called Al-Jalam in central Iraq. This is a village located in what is known as the Sunni heartland of the country. And crucially, he came from a family that was from something called the Badri tribe in Al-Jalam. And the Badri tribe traces its ancestry to the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. Beyond all that, his family chose this one particular mosque that, according to people that I spoke to in that neighborhood, was not just any mosque. It was a Wahhabi mosque.

The Wahhabi strain of Islam is one of the most hardline, the most austere, the most conservative. And early on in his upbringing, you see two things. You see, one, a real propensity towards religion, towards his faith. His childhood friends, his classmates, all talk about how they would be off on picnics, they'd be doing wheelies with their bikes in the street, and he was at the mosque. Wow. And the second thing that you hear about him around adolescence is that he starts to be outspoken when he sees people around him who are

in some way violating what he believes to be Islamic law. He gets into a big fight with his next door neighbor when his next door neighbor gets a tattoo. Baghdadi was irate about that, and he saw that as a violation of Sharia law, and he let his neighbor know. He got bolder and bolder as he became older. So in his later teenage years, he started to even abrade and reprimand people like the owner of the mosque that he attended. This is somebody who was older than him and who was a mentor to him. But he went so far as to chastise that man when he began smoking, telling him, quote, When you stand up and recite the prayer, the smell of your breath will make the angels fly away.

It sounds like Baghdadi is getting more and more dogmatic. Is that right? That certainly seems to be what people around him are noticing, but it's not yet at the point where it's really raising red flags. So he graduates high school. We were able to actually get his high school transcript. And from that, we gleaned that he was not a great student. But even though he has these low grades,

he manages to get into the University of Baghdad, specifically in their Islamic studies department, in their Sharia law department. And he begins a religious education. He doesn't have a lot of money. And so he's supporting himself by teaching Quranic classes and later by becoming a preacher and an imam at a local mosque. And it's at this local mosque that another trait of Baghdadi comes to light.

People always described him as shy, as reserved, as taciturn. But by this point, he's now in his early 20s. And these qualities that perhaps were seen as weaknesses when he was a child, they're now being interpreted as a sign of discipline, a sign of somebody who doesn't have a loose tongue, who says only exactly what he has to say and nothing more. It's around this time as well that he creates a soccer team that he becomes the coach of. Wait, he's a soccer coach?

He's a soccer coach and he was actually a pretty good player based on what other people said. And I get that there's some dissonance there. Jihadist groups have in the past declared soccer to be something that was haram, forbidden. But there it was. He was a good soccer player. He enjoyed playing soccer. But here's the twist. I spoke to members of his soccer team. And what's interesting is they said that they would play soccer. And at the end of the practice, he would call them all together. And at that point, he would start handing out leaflets that were trying to propagate the tenets of Wahhabi Islam. And one young man that I spoke to, he was a teenager back

when this occurred, he brought this pamphlet home to his family. And his parents flew into a rage and pulled him from the soccer team because they saw this as something inappropriate and as something that could be dangerous for their son. So he was out of step, I think, with the culture around him. And it also sounds like he was even then willing to take risks to be spreading these very hardline beliefs. Right. More and more as he's becoming an adult, you're seeing a man who isn't able to sit on the sidelines and just live his own faith in a private manner. He needs to co-opt people and turn them over to his interpretation of Islam. And he feels a need to police the faith of others, a need to tell others

how to be good Muslims, and a need to call out what he perceived as transgressions against that faith. Okay, so what happens next? In 2003, America begins an invasion of Iraq with its coalition partners. People were dispersing. Nobody wanted to be in Baghdad at this point in time because they were expecting that there were going to be strikes and bombardments. He goes back to Samarra, allegedly, and less than a year later, in early 2004, he's picked up in Fallujah at the home of his brother-in-law,

who at that point had picked up guns against the American occupation. The way it's been described to me is that he was essentially picked up almost by mistake. He was a hanger-on to his brother-in-law who had become radicalized. So the first thing that happens, according to his fellow prisoners, is that he was named the emir of their tent. At Camp Buka, there were specific tents that had dozens of prisoners each, and he gets named the emir of his tent. And under his emirship, he very quickly starts to incite violence against Shia prisoners that are being held inside this compound, to the point that Shia prisoners who were incarcerated there began to clamor at the gates, asking the Americans to be moved. Once the Shias

were mostly removed from his tent, he then turned his attention to his fellow Sunnis and he began actively policing the way that they practiced their faith. Why is your beard so short? How many times did you pray today? Why didn't you fast? It's the middle of Ramadan and so on. One anecdote that I was told is they caught somebody smoking in their tent and Baghdadi gave the order that he needed to be held down. And two of his fingers were cut off with a shank that had been made from the metal inside the air conditioning unit that they had in their tent. Wow. Yeah. And interestingly, that punishment, cutting off the two fingers that held the cigarette butt, that is a punishment that I later heard about in Mosul

from people who were accused of smoking under ISIS. So that seems pretty extreme. I mean, how rare is this kind of behavior in the camp? I think it's very extreme. And I think that it points to an evolution that happened before he got to Camp Bucca because that's a pretty out there place to be, to be doing that kind of thing in 2004 in Camp Bucca. How does he get out of this camp?

The Americans let him out end of 2004, less than a year after they captured him. Unfortunately, at that point in time, the American-led coalition had far bigger problems. This has been tough weeks in that country. Coalition forces have encountered serious violence in some areas of Iraq. Our military commanders report that this violence is being instigated by three groups. There was an insurgency that was exploding all over Iraq.

Some remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, along with Islamic militants, have attacked coalition forces in the city of Fallujah. Terrorists from other countries have infiltrated Iraq to incite and organize attacks. Suicide bombs were going off. Hundreds of people were getting killed. And they were busy trying to contain the chaos that had been unleashed in this country.

And he's not even on their radar screen. He's not on their radar screen. And in fact, he very much disappears from view. This is kind of the black hole in Baghdadi's evolution where we know the least about this period. But what is clear about this period, when we look back and we start interviewing people who were members of the insurgency,

we realize that in fact, he was working his way up the ranks of the organization all along. I have spoken to members of the Islamic State of Iraq. This is the group that preceded the Islamic State. And already in 2006, 2007, 2008, you are seeing him in the presence of senior leaders of the group that goes on to be the Islamic State,

but he's there in a support role. He's an aide, he's an associate, he's not the big guy yet. And the first time that he reappears for coalition officials is in 2009, when they do a raid in the house of one of the leaders of the insurgency, and they find a personnel roster that includes the following name, Abu Dhuwa. Abu Dhuwa, we later learn, is the Nondagherd that Baghdadi wore before he took the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And really just a year later, in 2010, the penultimate leader of ISIS is killed

and Baghdadi is named the new leader. He's taking over really what was a flagging and nearly defeated insurgency. According to the CIA, they were down to just 700 or so members. We want to flag for you tonight what may be an emerging genocide. It goes on to rebuild itself under his leadership. The Islamic army, known as ISIS, has seized vast territory in Syria and Iraq. So that by 2014, the leader of the militant group ISIS has called on Muslims throughout the world to travel to Iraq and Syria to help build an Islamic state. Training camps are open, so is our battlefield,

a voice purporting to be that of the leader of ISIS says in this video. Come on, youths of Islam, let's take Baghdad together. And it's working. Thousands of young men from across the Muslim world have offered their allegiance to a leader whose face they will probably never see. He and his group have seized an area the size of Great Britain in Iraq and Syria that is now controlling the faiths of up to 12 million people.

From YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to professional infographics and even their own mobile app, the group Islamic State is executing a highly strategic social media campaign to spread its cause. Experts say this level of sophistication is unprecedented. That has brought in some 40,000 foreign fighters from 100 different countries. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. And the moment in July of 2014 when he addresses the citizens of his so-called caliphate. Fawillitu alaykum walastu bi khayrikum wala afdhala minkum. That marks the first time that he has allowed his face to be videotaped, uncovered, and open for all to see.

And we don't see him again publicly in a televised address again until this year, 2019. Basically, just months before his death. We'll be right back. Rukmini, what had Baghdadi been doing for the last five years? So for the last five years, he is never seen publicly an address to the public. But what we know is that the Islamic State is running. And what is the Islamic State? The Islamic State was on the one hand, a sprawling administration that provided garbage collection and issued birth certificates and ran its own DMV and ran very much like a state. But the other thing

that they were doing is they tapped the tens of thousands of people that they recruited from overseas from 100 different countries. And they began using those people as essentially connectors to those countries in order to start carrying out attacks abroad. ISIS took responsibility for last night's attack, calling the knife men a soldier of the caliphate. And very quickly, we learned that ISIS has created a ritual. They released a two-and-a-half-minute video which they say shows the attacker,

whose face is covered, pledging allegiance to the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And the ritual is that both people who are carrying out acts of violence directed by ISIS and those who are merely inspired by the group record a video

pledging allegiance not to ISIS but to Baghdadi specifically. You see this in the Berlin attacker who used a large truck to run over people. used a large truck to run over people. You see this in the testament of the Paris attackers who left behind a video pledging allegiance to him. You see it in the 911 call that Omar Mateen made from the Pulse nightclub. What's your name?

My name is, I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State. So you see the start of a cult of personality beginning, where he is in a way invisible. You don't see him in public anymore. And yet his name is everywhere, on the tips of the tongues of every single one of these attackers. What's your name? I pledge my allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, hafidullah, on behalf of the Islamic State. So essentially, to his followers, he is ISIS. That's right. That's right.

And so as Baghdadi becomes more infamous, more of a known name, how are U.S. intelligence officials responding? He becomes the most hunted man in the world. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the world's most wanted man. The fate of a key ISIS leader is unclear this morning after U.S. airstrikes in Iraq. U.S. command have been unable to confirm media speculation. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was one of 50 casualties killed in an airstrike in Mosul in northern Iraq.

The U.S. is investigating reports from Russia that one of its airstrikes may have killed the leader of ISIS. But what's interesting is that even though there were constantly rumors about Baghdadi being killed, Baghdadi being injured, etc., when you speak to the people who were really involved in actually tracking him for the U.S. government, what they'll tell you is that in all of 2014, in all of 2015, the U.S. government, what they'll tell you is that in all of 2014, in all of 2015, and in all of 2016,

there was not a single verified, credible sighting of him. So they completely lost him from view. At the same time, the U.S., which had tried to disengage and leave Iraq, is forced to re-engage as ISIS becomes uncontrollable. U.S. troops return to the theater, first to Iraq and then to Syria. Airstrikes begin in both of these countries. And soon this tide begins to turn and ISIS, which had been growing, its territory begins to shrink. And little by little, this area that was the size of Great Britain gets smaller and smaller and smaller until we get to this February and March, where they were down to just one village, one tiny little place called Baguz in Syria. A vicious battle ensues, and eventually ISIS's territorial caliphate is lost.

When it is lost and the village of Baguz is completely emptied, we realize that he's still nowhere to be found. At this point, you got to believe, though, that they're closing in on him, right? Look, at this point in time, in February, I was six months pregnant. And I made the somewhat extreme decision of going to Syria to cover the war, to take back the last village under ISIS rule, specifically because we thought he was going to be there, right? They've squeezed them and squeezed them and squeezed them. And, you know, having covered this for so long,

I just, I couldn't live with myself with the thought that they were going to capture him in the desert and I would have missed it. But it was pretty anticlimactic when Baguz finally falls and he's nowhere to be found. So I end up staying in Syria for almost a month. I'm now close to seven months pregnant. I had to come home.

And I come back in early March. March passes, April passes, in April I have my baby. I start my maternity leave, and in July we start to hear chatter that they might have found Baghdadi's whereabouts. And then we don't hear anything else until suddenly this weekend. Last night, the United States brought the world's number one terrorist leader to justice. What I know is that sometime in the summer, they picked up two key people,

one of Baghdadi's wives and his main courier. It appears that the intelligence began to come together late last week. And these two people were able to provide, during interrogation, enough details that allowed the CIA to then flesh out where he might be hiding. And it was at that point commanders went to President Trump and he made the decision to go after the world's most wanted terrorist. We learned that Delta forces took off from an airbase in Iraq. 100 elite U.S. troops in eight helicopters flying in for over an hour.

They flew fast and low over the desert into Syria, and they descended on a compound that had a system of tunnels underneath it. Once there, forces blasted a hole through the side of the compound, catching those inside by surprise. Baghdadi was there. Baghdadi fled to an underground tunnel. He retreated into a tunnel. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the

tunnel. And he had dragged three of his young children with him. They were led to certain death. He was wearing a suicide vest. He reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down. reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. The tunnel had caved in on it in addition. But test results gave certain immediate and totally positive identification. It was him. So, what's the reaction from ISIS to his death?

The reaction so far has been disbelief. I'm seeing on their message boards, don't believe it. The Islamic State hasn't confirmed it yet. He's been declared dead numerous times before. And of course, they're right. But this is the first time that the United States, and not just one political party, but the US military, has announced that they believe that he is dead. So I do think this is a big blow for ISIS. And I would say that in some ways, it might even be a bigger deal than losing the territorial caliphate. The issue is that ISIS became so interwoven with this man

through this ritual of having their fighters declare allegiance to him and to him alone. So I think that this is going to be disorienting for their fighters. And in the succession battle that is now most likely going to unfold, we know that according to their own reading of scripture, in order to be a caliph, you have to be descended from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. There are plenty of militants. According to the Pentagon, there might be as many as 18,000 members of ISIS still remaining just in Iraq and Syria. But only a small number of those 18,000 are directly descended from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. So you now have a much smaller pool of people that you can choose from. bench is now so obscure, it's unclear whether the new person is going to be able to rise to the stature and have this cohesive effect over the group as he had. Rukmini, if we step back and look at how dramatically the politics in Syria have changed over the past month,

we've seen the president pulling U.S. troops out, seemingly allowing Turkey to attack our Kurdish partners on the ground. What does this raid mean in the context of that massive shift? Well, I think that this raid was rushed as a result of the chaos that has now descended on this corner of the world as a result of American foreign policy. I know from my sources that it wasn't supposed to happen right now. And I know from them that they had to hurry up and get their acts together because of a fear that as American forces pull out, as we lose the human intelligence that we had set up there, that we would essentially lose eyes on him. And so to me, it feels like we're seeing a replay of 2011 all over again. In 2011, we thought that this group had been defeated and American forces pulled out and they announced that

they were pulling out. So the insurgent group knew that all it has to do is sit tight for a little bit. And pretty soon American forces were going to be out of their way. And they were going to be face to face with Iraqi forces who, even though they were well equipped, were not able to contain what came after. And I think we're doing exactly the same thing now. We are leaving this area of the world in chaos. We're taking our eyes off of it. And it's as if you've put a pot on the fire. taking our eyes off of it. And it's as if you've put a pot on the fire. And at the moment when you turn your back,

it's not yet boiling, but you walk away and go do something else. And 10 minutes later, that pot is going to be boiling. Thank you so much, Rukmini. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, House Democrats changed course and said they would take a formal vote on an impeachment inquiry after repeatedly resisting calls for one.

So far, the impeachment inquiry has deliberately proceeded without such a vote, inviting criticism from congressional Republicans and President Trump, who claim that the process is secretive and illegitimate. But it now appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes that there is sufficient support for such a vote, that it would give the inquiry greater credibility, and that it would set forth rules for a more public phase of the impeachment, including open hearings.

And at least two wildfires in or near major California cities intensified on Monday, forcing large-scale evacuations. The sky is on fire right now. Ember's raining down all around us now. Look at all the spot fires it just handled just now. The Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, has doubled in size in 24 hours, burning at least 66,000 acres, an area nearly twice the size of San Francisco.

Get behind him. Let's push. Okay, don't forget what's on your left, all right? Don't knock that down. In anticipation of the fires, California's largest utility, PG&E, preemptively shut off power to more than 900,000 homes over the weekend, then restored it to some, and is now expected to once again cut power to 500,000 customers later today.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.