82 The EconomistNovember 2nd 2019
N
o one paidparticular attention to the boy who haunted his lo-
cal mosque in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, and Ibra-
him Awad never said much to them. When he did, he mumbled,
being shy. His father taught Koranic chant there, so in his spare
time Ibrahim would do the same, unobserved in some corner,
muttering over the holy book. When it came to singing out,
though, he would suddenly find his voice, making the words ring
through the building. They noticed him then.
In much the same way, over the years, he worked unobtrusively
towards leadership of the world’s most feared terrorist group, Is-
lamic State: towards control of an area covering 34,000 square
miles, and command over bloody and random attacks as far afield
as Paris, Sri Lanka, Florida and Manchester. He moved from one ji-
hadist outfit to another invisibly and with discipline. Although his
head was full of lions, unsheathed swords and infidels dying in
their own blood, he did not fight. He behaved like a secretary, serv-
ing the tea at meetings and fading into the background. One of his
aliases was “the Ghost”. When he was not driving by night to meet
jihadists, he was finishing his doctoral thesis on medieval Koranic
recitation. But in June 2014, in the pulpit of the Grand Mosque in
Mosul, the city his forces had easily overrun only days before, he
once more found his voice. Now that ishad territory—the city of
Raqqa, too, had fallen to him—he declared a Sunni caliphate and
himself Caliph Ibrahim, the most pious, the warrior, the reviver,
who would take Baghdad and lead his mujahideenas far as Rome.
He not only spoke, but posted his sermon on YouTube. The world
noticed him then.
He also surprised those who thought they knew him, the family
man and keen footballer, living for years in a garret by the Tobchi
mosque and teaching children there. Obviously he had been galva-
nised by the American invasion and his imprisonment in 2004 at
Camp Bucca, where he taught the other yellow-clad inmates so se-renely that his crusader-captors thought him no threat, and let
him out. But his interest in the strict imposition of Islamic law
came earlier. At university, prompted by an uncle, he had joined a
jihadist-Salafist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Long before that
in the Samarra mosque he would devoutly clean and sweep, aware
that his ancestors had won respect for doing that task. He would
chastise his neighbours for their un-Islamic smoking, tattoos, or
dancing with women. Friends called him “The Believer”, and he
could unsettle them with his stare long before he had power
enough to order the killing of anyone who defied him.
Time and again his Mosul sermon nodded to history and to the
Prophet. That was the difference he, a scholar, made to the jihadist
movement. He was not an engineer like Osama bin Laden or a doc-
tor like Ayman al-Zawahiri, both leaders of al-Qaeda. He brought
intellectual weight, as well as the membership he claimed in the
Qurayshi tribe, descendants of the Prophet. When he spoke at Mo-
sul he wore black robes to evoke the Abbasids, the most powerful
caliphs of early Islam. His nom de guerre, coined earlier, anticipat-
ed this day: Abu Bakr, the first caliph after Muhammad’s death; al-
Baghdadi, the Abbasids’ capital. The caliphate itself was ordained
by Allah, the ultimate means for the ever-bickering Arabs to unite
as a holy nation. They had forgotten it. He would build it.
From the moment he had joined al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2005, he
had global aims. When, the next year, it re-formed into Islamic
State of Iraq, he became its propagandist: at first in Nineveh prov-
ince, then as far as he could get. In 2010 he became its leader; by
2013, he relaunched it as plain Islamic State; by 2014 he had broken
from al-Qaeda, rejecting Mr Zawahiri’s orders to stay in Iraq. There
was too much to do in Syria as it collapsed: coalitions to pursue,
fighters to recruit, oilfields and hostages to seize to provide a rev-
enue stream. Assiduously he drew up dossiers of local police and
potential donors, looking out for anyone useful, as he had made
use of Baathists and Saddam’s former officers in Iraq. Meanwhile
he targeted flaunters of Islamic law, in beach resorts or nightclubs,
no matter. Each strike seemed to draw young men and some young
women too, from all corners, to follow the black “I testify” flag. By
bold leaps and bounds his potential caliphate grew.
In the cities he conquered he set up offices to take in taxes and
traffic fines, register babies and licence marriages, as in a proper
state. He imposed the sharia in which he was expert: hands hacked
off for stealing, whippings for drunkenness, adulterous women
stoned. He also expanded it, justifying everything smoothly with
holy writ. Unbelievers were expelled or killed if they did not pay
their taxes. Yazidis were driven from their homes and their women
abducted to be sold and raped with organised efficiency. Enemies
were crucified, burned alive, drowned in cages, beheaded with
slow saws, while everything was filmed and posted online for the
world to observe and dread. He sometimes shared the videos first
with the kufr women he kept chained in a nearby room for his own
pleasure. Raping an infidel woman was a spiritual exercise that
brought a believer close to God.
While all this went on he was still hidden, still constantly on
the move. Visitors who wished to see him were stripped of all de-
vices, blindfolded and driven for hours to a blank room, where he
would softly sermonise. Many intelligence agencies declared him
dead, but they were wrong. He made audio exhortations, and in
2019 showed himself again, congratulating his fighters for the
Easter church bombings in Sri Lanka that had killed 290 people.
Now, like bin Laden, he had a Kalashnikov as a prop. His caliphate
had crumbled away, but he fortified his followers by invoking the
Battle of the Trench in 627, when Muhammad with 3,000 men had
prevailed against a force of 10,000, and had pulled his Ahzab rivals
over to his side. He appealed to the soldiers of the caliphate to fight
like that, to the last drop of blood.
Muhammad had dug a trench to frustrate his enemies. Caliph
Ibrahim had dug a tunnel, but it was dead-ended, and he had to de-
ploy his suicide-vest to make himself disappear. 7Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (born Ibrahim Awad), leader of Islamic
State, blew himself up on October 26th, aged 48The blood-soaked scholar
Obituary Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi