DUBAI: Islamic State’s secretive chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is becoming like the proverbial cat with nine lives, with reports of him being “seriously injured” or even “killed” surfacing every few months.
The latest is a report from Iraqi news agency WAA, which said a lunch prepared for him and three IS leaders in Nineveh governorate of Iraq was poisoned. The report was repeated around the world, triggering speculation about his fate.
One of the first reports that he had died emerged months after he was made the “caliph” of the IS in 2014. In November that year, it was reported that he was killed in a US air strike. A week later, Baghdadi surfaced with an audio tape calling for “volcanoes of jihad” around the world.
He was reportedly “seriously injured” in an air strike by the US-led coalition at al-Baaj in Nineveh on March 18, 2015.
In October 2015, the Iraqi military said an air strike had targeted Baghdadi’s motorcade as he travelled to Karbala. This too turned out to be incorrect.
In June this year, media reports in several countries including Turkey’s Yeni Safak daily and Iraq’s Al Sumariya TV network, said Baghdadi had been killed or injured when an air strike hit an IS convoy near Raqqa.
{{/usCountry}}In June this year, media reports in several countries including Turkey’s Yeni Safak daily and Iraq’s Al Sumariya TV network, said Baghdadi had been killed or injured when an air strike hit an IS convoy near Raqqa.
{{/usCountry}}The re-emergence of Baghdadi after reports of his “death” has only added to his mystique, given most people didn’t even know what he looked like till he appeared in a video of a sermon at a mosque in Mosul in July 2014.
Credited with transforming a breakaway al Qaeda faction into the dreaded terror group that has seized large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria, Baghdadi carries a $ 10 million bounty on his head. But little is known about the man, whose real name is Ibrahim al-Samarrai. Born in 1971 in Samarra, Iraq, to a lower-middle class Sunni family, Baghdadi’s movements are known only by his inner circle. The Caliph, as he is known to followers, is constantly on the move, changing locations in Iraq and Syria to avoid airstrikes.
But his ex-wife has claimed he was a “family man” and an “ideal father” to his children before he became the chief of the terror group. “I married a normal person, a university lecturer. He was a family man,” Saja al-Dulaimi told CNN Swedish affiliate Expressen TV.