Reclusive jihadist supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi oversaw the bloodstained rise and ultimate collapse of his Islamic State group’s “caliphate” while keeping such a low profile that he was nicknamed “The Ghost”.
After proclaiming himself caliph in 2014, Baghdadi held sway over seven million people across swathes of Syria and Iraq, where IS implemented its brutal version of Islamic law.
His infamous declaration from the Al-Nuri Mosque in Iraq’s Mosul unleashed a wave of violence that has since killed thousands of civilians, displaced millions more and drawn world powers into the region’s conflicts.
Rarely seen even when IS was at the peak of its power, the Iraqi native — believed to be around 48 years old — virtually vanished as IS’s territory shrank and it was reduced to a disparate network of jihadist sleeper cells.
Baghdadi was already rumoured to have been wounded or killed several times before President Donald Trump announced Sunday he had “died like a dog” in a US raid in Syria, detonating his own suicide vest.
Source: Guardian Newspaper.
