The Islamic State (IS) group’s elusive supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made his first purported appearance in five years in a propaganda video released on Monday, acknowledging the group’s defeat in the Syrian town of Baghouz ,while threatening “revenge” attacks.
The world’s most wanted man was last seen in Mosul in 2014, announcing the birth of the group’s much-feared “caliphate” across swathes of Iraq and Syria, and appears to have outlived the proto-state.
In the video released by group’s al-Furqan media arm, the man said to be al-Baghdadi referred to the months-long fight for IS’ final redoubt, Baghouz, which ended in March.
Photo: AP
“The battle for Baghouz is over,” he said, sitting cross-legged on a cushion and addressing three men whose faces have been blurred.
He referred to a string of Islamic State defeats, including its onetime Iraqi capital, Mosul, and Sirte in Libya, but insisted the jihadists had not “surrendered” territory.
“God ordered us to wage jihad,” he said. “He did not order us to win.”
In a segment in which the man is not on camera, his voice described the April 21 Easter attacks in Sri Lanka, which killed 253 people and wounded nearly 500, as “vengeance for their brothers in Baghouz.”
The man insisted that IS’ operations against the West were part of a “long battle,” and that IS would continue to “take revenge” for members who had been killed.
“There will be more to come after this battle,” he said.
On Monday, IS militants claimed their first attack in Bangladesh in more than two years, saying they had “detonated an explosive device” on a group of police in Dhaka, wounding three officers, the SITE Intelligence Group reported.
The US, which has a US$25 million bounty on al-Baghdadi’s head, said it was assessing the authenticity of the video, but vowed to keep up the battle against the extremist group.
The US-led coalition will “ensure an enduring defeat of these terrorists and that any leaders who remain are delivered the justice that they deserve,” a US Department of State spokesman said.
Even if al-Baghdadi is alive and well, the spokesman said that the militants, frequently called ISIS, had been battered.
“ISIS’ territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria was a crushing strategic and psychological blow as ISIS saw its so-called caliphate crumble, its leaders killed or flee the battlefield, and its savagery exposed,” he said.
The speaker identified as al-Baghdadi referred encouragingly to popular protests in Sudan and Algeria, apparently to demonstrate the video was recent.
“The mention of places like Sri Lanka and Sudan are largely to timestamp the video, to show that it wasn’t created a long time ago,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
He said that the references to lost territory were also an effort to reshape IS narrative.
“Part of the importance of someone like him is to contextualize the defeat ... to show that this was either an expected turn of events, or that it might be unfortunate, but that it’s survivable,” Amarasingam said.
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