• Virtual Caliphate: Endless propaganda, the dangerous arsenal that rearms the Islamic State

Bland, bland, ordinary ... are the first appeals that come to mind to Abu Faruq Iraqui, a veteran of the holy war, when this newspaper asks him about the old imam of his Tobchi Baghdad mosque. By that year 2000, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not even intuit that he would end his days between the pit and the gallows, neither that apolitical and soccer preacher of Samarra, who then called himself Abu Omar , intuited that he would live a Caliphate glory and an end rather, that, banal.

Much has been said about Abu Bakr Bagdadi and almost nothing has come out of his mouth. Therefore, building his biography is similar to assembling a puzzle that moves us from Iraq to Syria, on a trip during which, gradually, that half-haired neighborhood cleric becomes one of the greatest butchers that the world has known . Abu Faruq Iraqui, a fervent militant opposed to the Western invasion of Iraq in 2003 who met the young Baghdadi, recounts his turning point.

The particular epiphany of Baghdadi took place in 2004, during his confinement in the Bucca prison camp , just outside the Basra, where he went to stop after a raid against his brother in the town of Falluja. "People who shared jail with him in Bucca have assured me that it was the atmosphere of that limited and crowded compound, where discussions and fights prevailed among the prisoners, which ended up shaking Baghdadi's mind," explains Iraqui.

"Bucca was going to stop all kinds of arrests, both combatants and people who had never taken up arms. That was a big mistake for the Americans because, in a jail like that, where they all ended up together, they all ended up radicalizing and going out into jihadists. ", Add. In that chaotic environment, an imam that everyone turned to for religious peace could easily mediate. Especially if he had a project willing to challenge Al Qaeda itself .

Therefore, when, in an error that the US has paid dearly , Baghdadi was released from Bucca at ten months, his rise would be unstoppable. He compensated for his lack of charisma with large doses of strategy. His speech, from well-founded to innovative, and the connections made between bars allowed him to surround himself with a new generation of young jihadists with whom, in 2010, he reactivated an al-Qaeda in Iraq come down after the murder of the bloodthirsty Abu Musab Zarqaui.

An 'umma' with attractive

The main innovation introduced by Baghdadi in the Salafist discourse was the possibility of founding a 'land for Muslims' , as opposed to the idea of ​​'umma', the transnational community of the faithful that Islam advocates. A proposal previously practiced by the Taliban in Afghanistan, for which Bagdadi tried to make it attractive by adding a patina of nostalgic manichaeism: the possibility of re-founding the 'Golden Age' of Islam by reissuing the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. With him as a new caliph.

With these wicker was that Abu Bakr Bagdadi proclaimed himself Caliph Ibrahim on the pulpit of the Great Mosque of Mosul, on the eve of the month of Ramadan 2014. Shortly before, in a fleeting operation, the result of forging alliances with other groups opposed to the Iraqi Government , had taken the northern city. Similarly he had acted in Syria, with an unusual level of violence, becoming the hegemonic extremist force. Thus, the caliphate of the IS, with a territory under its control between Syria and Iraq equivalent to that of Great Britain, became a global threat .

During the last five years, dozens of terrorist attacks around the world have had the IS seal. Well carried out by believers trained in lands of the pseudocaliphate, well executed under oath of allegiance to Abu Bakr Bagdadi, the black flag with the seal of the prophet has brought headlong to the intelligence services of half the world. The SI, experts explain, dominates the digital media, propaganda and draconian methods of government, with which he stabilized his caliphate, as few.

A leader without mysticism

And, in the midst of all this maelstrom, Abu Bakr Bagdadi barely knew. Beyond periodic voice messages attributed to the 'caliph', only two videos, that of the proclamation of the caliphate and another published last April, after losing the IS its last stronghold in eastern Syria, attest to its existence. Evasive for intelligence services, Baghdadi became the symbol of an organization that used merciless violence with the enemy and the sowing of discord between fellow men to grow and amplify their message. But he designed his organization in such a way that his end does not prophesy the defeat of the IS.

Those who knew about him talk about an individual obsessed with security , allergic to electronics and in favor of communicating by correspondence. A leader with a grandiloquent plan with which to shake the planet, but at the same time little given to be seen. Able to go unnoticed to the point of mocking, by little, more than an attempt to capture him. In between, Russia, Syria and Iraq claimed the murder of Baghdadi, without ever having conclusive evidence.

Abu Bakr Bagdadi has had so little mysticism that he has not even been able to contradict that saying: The harder you climb, the harder the fall will be. If his physical caliphate had a meteoric career, expanding throughout the Middle East and implanting in distant places like Libya, Nigeria or the Philippines, to end up buried only five years later in Baguz, among the meanders of the Syrian Euphrates, his caliph, which Napoleon dreamed of an empire to end his days hidden from the world in his private St. Helena.

So many enemies had won their way up to the skies that, in the agony of Baguz, according to Western Intelligence, a group of IS members organized a coup d'etat and an attempted assassination. He fled for the hair. He ended up in the northwestern corner of Syria, exiled from his own already non-existent caliphate, persecuted by many of his former allies and surrounded by a tiny circle of trust. Or even that. A betrayal could deny him the only privilege enjoyed by the Little Cape in his last days.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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