10 Time November 11, 2019
T
he deaTh of abu bakr al-baghdadi may
not change the world. Nevertheless, how it
came about says a fair amount about the world
he has departed.
In the chain of events that led to the Oct. 26 demise of
the ISIS leader, every link tells a story. But even as it crys-
tallizes what the war on terrorism looks like 18 years after
9/11, al-Baghdadi’s death may mark the beginning of an
uncertain new chapter.
The first link begins with the government of Iraq,
which in September arrested one of al-Baghdadi’s wives
and a courier. Intelligence pointed to Syria, where the
CIA was already working with the Kurdish militia. Both
Iraq and the Kurds are committed enemies of ISIS. Iraqis
suffered tens of thousands of casualties pushing ISIS out
of their country from 2014 to 2017, and Kurdish militias
lost some 11,000 fighters finishing the job in Syria, where
the group’s claim of a caliphate was erased.
Their involvement underscores that this is a global
fight: the U.S. is not going it alone. The people actually
prosecuting the war on terror are overwhelmingly local
and Muslim—in Iraq and Syria, but also in Libya, Niger,
Chad, Mali, Somalia, southern Yemen and much of Af-
ghanistan, where more than 58,000 Afghan national mil-
itary and police forces lost their lives through 2018. Typi-
cally the U.S. military role in these missions is restricted
to half a dozen or more special- operations commandos
working with local forces by providing intelligence, train-
ing and air cover. The local forces are mostly Muslim.
Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria continued to battle
ISIS and hunted al-Baghdadi even after American forces
retreated from those countries. On Oct. 6, Trump or-
dered U.S. troops to pull back from territory held by the
Kurds, who were left alone to face an attack by Turkey. “I
don’t think we could have done this without the help we
got from the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds,” a U.S. official told
TIME, speaking of the operation against the ISIS leader.
The official quickly added that Iraq military and intelli-
gence officers “kicked the whole thing off.”
Al-Baghdadi’s trail led east. He appeared to have gone
to ground not near the lush Euphrates valley where ISIS
fighters made their last stand in Syria—and where his
fighters still mount ambushes and suicide attacks—but
in Idlib province, the last large section of Syria still con-
trolled by rebel militias, which in turn are dominated by
an affiliate of al-Qaeda. That’s the next link in the war
on terrorism: it’s far from over. Militant Islam may hold
scant appeal to the overwhelming majority of the world’s
1.8 billion Muslims (a 2015 Pew Center survey found al-
most no more support for ISIS in Lebanon than in Israel),
but a terrorist attack does not require great numbers, and
chaos gives extremism both oxygen and
maneuvering room. Not by chance are
ISIS, al-Qaeda and their offshoots found
in the globe’s least- governed locations.
Like Syria. During its eight-year civil
war, the country was a proving ground
for jihadists, many drawn by the sec-
tarian nature the conflict quickly as-
sumed. The Damascus government of
Bashar Assad is dominated by Alawites,
a heterodox religious minority. Assad’s
brutal answer to peaceful Arab Spring
protests by Syria’s Sunni Muslim major-
ity was answered by a range of armed
groups, including extremists who domi-
nated the rebel battlefield. ISIS was a
latecomer, having begun across the des-
ert border as al-Qaeda in Iraq. There
ISIS fought the U.S. occupation while
slaughtering Shiʻite Muslims and reli-
gious minorities.al-Baghdadi, Born Ibrahim Awad
Ibrahim Ali al-Badri 48 years ago in a
village in central Iraq, took his nom de
guerre from the capital city, where he
got a Ph.D. in Quranic studies. He was
swept up in arrests by U.S. forces in 2004TheBrief Opener
△
The ISIS leader
had gone to
ground near the
Turkish border,
in an area known
for smugglers
and al-QaedaTERRORISM
The world after
al-Baghdadi
By Karl Vick and W.J. Hennigan