The Reciter

Baghdadi’s lower middle-class family was known for its piety but also for its proud lineage. His Sunni forefathers claimed to descend from the Prophet Muhammad through the Shiite leaders buried in Samarra’s golden-domed shrine. Baghdadi’s lineage is one instance of the many overlapping religious identities in Iraq that belie the supposedly eternal divide between Sunnis and Shiites. Al-Qaida would bomb the shrine years later after the American invasion in an effort to make that divide a reality.

The golden-domed al-Askari Shrine in Samarra, Iraq, is one of the holiest sites for Shiites. Wikipedia

The family patriarch, Baghdadi’s father Awwad, was active in the religious life of the community. It was at the mosque where his father taught that the teenaged Baghdadi got his own start as a teacher, leading neighborhood children in chanting the Quran. This was his first experience with oratory and religious instruction. When reciting the scripture, a revered vocation in Islam, Baghdadi’s quiet voice would come to life, pronouncing the letters in firm, reverberating tones. He devoted countless hours to mastering the subtleties of the art.

Despite the religiosity of Baghdadi’s family, some of its members joined the Baath Party, a socialist organization dedicated to the goal of pan-Arab union. Although Baathist leaders tolerated and sometimes even encouraged private devotion as an outlet for religious fervor, they were wary of religious activism as a threat to their rule. Baathism had dominated Iraqi politics and the machinery of state since the late 1960s, so citizens who wanted government jobs had to join the party regardless of their personal convictions.

Two of Baghdadi’s uncles served in Saddam’s security services, and one of his brothers became an officer in the army. Another brother who served in the military died during the grueling eight-year war that Iraq fought against Iran in the 1980s with tacit U.S. support. Baghdadi might well have shared that fate had the war continued a little longer and his near-sightedness not disqualified him from military service.

The Prisoner

Late in 2003, after the Americans had defeated and disbanded Saddam’s army, Baghdadi helped found Jaysh Ahl al-Sunna wa-l-Jamaah (Army of the People of the Sunna and Communal Solidarity), an insurgent group that fought U.S. troops and their local allies in northern and central Iraq.

Baghdadi was arrested during a U.S. raid and sent to Camp Bucca in Iraq in 2004. Northern German Broadcasting

Soon after, in February 2004, Baghdadi was arrested in Fallujah while visiting a friend who was on the American wanted list. He was transferred to a detention facility at Camp Bucca, a sprawling complex in southern Iraq. Prison files classified him as a “civilian detainee,” which meant his captors didn’t know he was a jihadist.

For the ten months he remained in custody, Baghdadi hid his militancy and devoted himself to religious instruction. “Baghdadi was a quiet person,” remembers an anonymous fellow inmate interviewed by The Guardian. “He has a charisma. You could feel that he was someone important.” Baghdadi led prayers, preached Friday sermons, and conducted religious classes for other prisoners.

Once again he dazzled his comrades—and, no doubt, his jailers—on the soccer field. And yet again he was compared to an Argentinian great: his nickname at Camp Bucca was “Maradona.”

Baghdadi ingratiated himself with both the Sunni inmates and the Americans, looking for opportunities to negotiate with the camp authorities and mediate between rival groups of prisoners.

“Every time there was a problem in the camp,” recalls The Guardian’s source, “he was at the center of it. He wanted to be the head of the prison—and when I look back now, he was using a policy of conquer and divide to get what he wanted, which was status. And it worked.”

Many of the 24,000 inmates at Bucca were Sunni Arabs who had served in Saddam’s military and intelligence services. When Saddam fell, so did they, a consequence of the American purge of the Baathists and the new ascendency of Iraq’s long-oppressed Shiite majority. If they weren’t jihadists when they arrived, many of them were by the time they left. Radical jihadist manifestos circulated freely under the eyes of the watchful but clueless Americans.

“New recruits were prepared so that when they were freed they were ticking time bombs,” remembers another fellow inmate, who was interviewed by a reporter with Al Monitor. When a new prisoner came in, his peers would “teach him, indoctrinate him, and give him direction so he leaves a burning flame.” Baghdadi would turn out to be the most explosive of those flames, a man responsible for much of the conflagration that would engulf the region less than a decade later.

Detainees pray at Camp Bucca, a U.S.-run facility that closed in 2009. AP

Many of the ex-Baathists at Bucca, some of whom Baghdadi befriended, would later rise with him through the ranks of the Islamic State. “If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no [Islamic State] now,” recalled the inmate interviewed by The Guardian. “Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.” The prisoners dubbed the camp “The Academy,” and during his ten months in residence, Baghdadi was one of its faculty members.

By the time Baghdadi was released on December 8, 2004, he had a virtual Rolodex for reconnecting with his co-conspirators and protégés: they had written one another’s phone numbers in the elastic of their underwear.

The Confidant

Just two months before Baghdadi’s release, al-Qaida established a branch of its terror network in Iraq by absorbing a jihadist militia run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and putting him in charge of it. Zarqawi, a Jordanian who wanted to create an Islamic state, thought he could use al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) to provoke a sectarian civil war between Iraq’s minority Sunnis and the majority Shiites, which would force the Sunnis to turn to his group for protection. Once AQI emerged victorious from the ensuing bloodbath, as he expected it to do, there would be no serious obstacles to establishing the Islamic state he dreamed of. Al-Qaida’s leaders reluctantly agreed to Zarqawi’s brutal program because they wanted a hand in the new insurgency against the Americans. But they quickly came to regret their endorsement when the shocking violence of Zarqawi’s group, which he publicized online, alienated the Muslim masses whose support al-Qaida cultivated to prosecute its global war on America and its allies.

Baghdadi would almost certainly have met jihadists in Zarqawi’s circle during his time in Bucca, and would doubtless have been attracted to a jihadist group even more extreme than his own. After his release from Bucca, Baghdadi called a relative in al-Qaida, who connected him with a spokesman for the group in Iraq. The spokesman convinced Baghdadi to go to Damascus to perform tasks for al-Qaida, assuring him that he could also finish his dissertation while he was working for them. Academically-trained religious scholars are rare in jihadist organizations, so it made sense to send a budding scholar to Syria where the Americans wouldn’t be able to get their hands on him. Once he was there, Baghdadi set about his assigned task of ensuring that AQI’s online propaganda was in line with its brand of ultraconservative Islam. Baghdadi’s tribal connections in Iraq and his ties with other jihadist groups there must have also come in handy, because on several occasions he was able to help foreign jihadists cross Syria’s border into his native land. At the time, Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, was turning a blind eye to the foreign fighter pipeline into Iraq in order to punish the United States for invading the country; that same pipeline would one day flow in the opposite direction after Assad’s citizens revolted against him in 2011.

In 2006, al-Qaida in Iraq formed an umbrella organization for jihadist groups resisting the American occupation. Baghdadi’s group was one of the first to join. Soon after, Zarqawi declared his intent to establish an Islamic state, directly countermanding al-Qaida’s instructions to wait until after the Americans had withdrawn and AQI secured popular support for establishing the state. When Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June, his successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian jihadist, went ahead with the plan. He proclaimed the founding of the Islamic State in October and dissolved AQI, announcing that its soldiers were now part of the Islamic State. Masri assumed the title of minister of war although he actually ran the new organization; the titular emir of the group, Abu Umar, an Iraqi, was just a figurehead in the beginning.

The new leaders of the Islamic State pledged private oaths of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, but in public they maintained the fiction that the State was independent of al-Qaida. They hoped outsiders would think of their organization as an independent state or even the beginnings of a restored caliphate, the far-flung empire of early Islam. The ambiguity surrounding their relationship would later lead to conflict between the two organizations.

Because of his scholarly credentials, Baghdadi was put in charge of the Islamic State’s religious affairs in some of its Iraqi “provinces.” Because the group did not yet actually control any territory, this largely meant that Baghdadi continued to be responsible for ensuring that the Islamic State’s propaganda reflected its creed, and that its foot soldiers abided by its strictures and implemented the harsh punishments prescribed by Islamic scripture wherever and whenever they could. Accused adulterers whom they managed to capture were stoned, alcohol drinkers were whipped, thieves had their hands amputated, and “apostates”—anyone who defied the Islamic State’s program—were executed.

Taking a break from his pastoral duties, Baghdadi showed up in Baghdad on March 13, 2007, to defend his dissertation. It was yet another critical edition of a medieval book about Quranic recitation—this time a commentary on a poem about how to recite the Quran. Baghdadi’s advisor in Tikrit couldn’t attend because of the violence raging across Iraq, so he sent in comments on the dissertation, pointing out some errors and suggesting some revisions. But overall he was happy with his student’s work, and Baghdadi received his Ph.D. in Quranic Sciences with a grade of “very good” for his dissertation.

Baghdadi’s newly-minted scholarly credentials as well as the work he had done managing the Islamic State’s religious affairs brought him to the attention of Masri, who appointed him supervisor of the Sharia Committee, hence the enforcer of all the Islamic State’s religious strictures. Masri also named him to the 11-member Consultative Council. The council ostensibly advised the emir, Abu Umar, but was actually controlled by Masri, whose support came from his fellow foreign jihadists. When Baghdadi joined the council, the Iraqi members were growing restless and had rallied around their countryman Abu Umar, hoping for a greater say in the decision-making.

Much as he had done in Camp Bucca, Baghdadi quickly found a role as a conciliator between the two sides. Despite being a Masri protégé, Baghdadi earned enough of Abu Umar’s trust to be appointed to the Islamic State’s Coordination Committee, a powerful three-man panel that could select, supervise, and fire the Islamic State’s commanders in the group’s Iraqi provinces. Baghdadi drafted messages on Abu Umar’s behalf to his al-Qaida boss, Osama bin Laden. He also coordinated communication between the Islamic State’s top leaders and their provincial representatives, much of which was conducted by couriers.

In early 2010, the Iraqis captured one of these couriers, a man who carried messages between Abu Umar and the Islamic State’s commander in Baghdad, Manaf al-Rawi. According to one insider account, a mole in the Iraqi security service warned Baghdadi that al-Rawi was in danger, but Baghdadi failed to pass on the warning. Perhaps Baghdadi worried more about saving his own skin than protecting his bosses—communicating with them after the courier’s capture could have exposed him to danger. Whatever the case, the captured courier led the Iraqi authorities to al-Rawi, who, under interrogation, gave his captors information that enabled a U.S.-Iraqi force in April 2010 to surround the mud house outside Tikrit where Abu Umar and Masri were hiding. The two blew themselves up rather than surrender.

With their deaths, the Islamic State faced its first leadership succession. The Consultative Council couldn’t meet in conclave to choose a new emir since that might have ended with another American-led raid and another multiple suicide. Bin Laden, who still had the allegiance of the Islamic State, issued instructions to the Consultative Council to appoint an interim leader and to send him a list of candidates for emir and their qualifications.

The Emir

With the death of the Islamic State’s commanders, the head of the Islamic State’s military council, Hajji Bakr, was suddenly in a position to manipulate the succession. A former officer in Saddam’s army who had served time in Camp Bucca after Baghdadi’s release, Bakr was tainted as the former servant of an impious regime and therefore not a contender for supreme leadership himself, so he set about to be the kingmaker and the power behind the throne. Ignoring bin Laden’s instructions, Hajji Bakr polled the 11 members of the Consultative Council on their preferences. But he reportedly rigged the outcome by writing a letter to each saying that all of the others were in favor of Baghdadi. Perhaps the cagey colonel believed the young Baghdadi would be more pliable than the other contenders, or that he would be less loyal to the Islamic State’s distant lords in al-Qaida, who constantly objected to the Islamic State’s brutal brand of insurgency. In making the case for Baghdadi, Hajji Bakr would undoubtedly have extolled Baghdadi’s lineage from the Prophet, his mastery of the Quran, and his managerial experience in the organization.

The council elected the new emir of the Islamic State by a vote of 9 to 2. It was then that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at the age of 39, took his now-famous nom de guerre, a double homage to his faith and his native land. Abu Bakr was Muhammad’s father-in-law and, after the Prophet’s death, the first caliph; Baghdad was the capital of the grandest caliphate in early Islam, the Abbasid dynasty. The Abbasids had swept to power in the eighth century using clever apocalyptic propaganda and clandestine networks to mobilize popular anger against the ruling regime in Damascus. Baghdadi was clearly hoping to repeat the performance on the same stage.

With the new emir’s blessing, not to mention gratitude, Hajji Bakr set about purging the ranks of the Islamic State of anyone who could challenge Baghdadi’s authority. Dubbed by Islamic State insiders as the “prince of shadows” and the emir’s “private minister,” Hajji Bakr settled scores and eliminated rivals through intimidation and assassination, much as Saddam had done.

The power had now shifted from the foreign fighters to the Iraqi members of the Islamic State. As American and Iraqi forces killed or captured the previous emir’s commanders, their replacements were often, like Baghdadi and Hajji Bakr, former prisoners from Camp Bucca. And many, like Bakr, were also former officers in Saddam’s military or intelligence services. Such men would prove useful in running a new authoritarian state.

Secure on the throne, Baghdadi and his éminence grise set about reviving the Islamic State’s flagging fortunes. Military setbacks had forced the group underground in 2008 and subsequent attacks like the one on Abu Umar and Masri had decimated its command structure. Baghdadi and Hajji Bakr were determined to bring the fight out in the open again and seize the territory necessary for establishing a caliphate. The growing unrest in Syria in 2011 played directly into their hands. Presented with an opportunity to inject violence into what had been a peaceful revolt, Baghdadi sent one of his Syrian operatives to set up a secret branch of the Islamic State in the country that year. The branch, later known as the Nusra Front, initially followed the Islamic State’s playbook by attacking civilians as part of a clandestine terror campaign to sow chaos. The hope was that the Islamic State would be able to capitalize on that chaos in order to make its first land grab.

Syrian President Assad lumped these attacks on civilians with the actions of those who had been protesting his regime to claim that the peaceful protestors were really nothing but terrorists. But as Nusra evolved into an insurgent organization, it became more careful about killing Sunni civilians and more dedicated to working with other Sunni rebel factions to oust Assad. This shift also reflected the guidance Nusra received from al-Qaida’s new emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had replaced bin Laden after he was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in May 2011. Zawahiri believed it was wiser to cultivate popular support before trying to establish an Islamic state, so he called on Nusra to collaborate with the other rebels.

Baghdadi disagreed with Zawahiri, to whom he had pledged a private oath of allegiance. As he saw things, there was already an Islamic State; it just needed to be made real by territorial conquest in Syria. Nusra’s cooperation with the other Sunni rebels was thwarting that plan.

In the spring of 2013, Baghdadi ordered his subordinates in Nusra to comply with his strategy; they refused. Furious, Baghdadi announced publicly that Nusra was part of the Islamic State, which he renamed the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Nusra’s leader responded by repudiating Baghdadi’s authority and pledging his own direct oath of allegiance to Zawahiri. When Zawahiri accepted the oath of Nusra’s leader and ordered Baghdadi to concern himself only with Iraq, he refused. Baghdadi wanted control of Syria as well. Under Baghdadi’s leadership the Islamic State began to gobble up territory in eastern Syria, pushing out other Sunni rebel groups including Nusra. Zawahiri had no choice but to expel the Islamic State from al-Qaida, which he did in February 2014. In the ensuing melee between Nusra and the Islamic State, the latter came out on top: The State consolidated its hold on eastern Syria and siphoned off the bulk of Nusra’s foreign fighter contingent, whose members were more interested in setting up a state of their own than trying to topple Assad’s.

The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State
by William McCants

In his new book, McCants explains how the Islamic State defied conventional jihadist thinking about how to wage wars and win recruits. Based largely on primary sources in Arabic, including secret al-Qaida and Islamic State letters few outsiders have seen, McCants reveals the group’s violent past and forecasts its dark future. Learn more about the book from St. Martin’s Press.

Soon after, reports began to circulate about how the Islamic State governed its new lands. Baghdadi had previously been able to inflict Islamic punishments only on those who were unlucky enough to be captured by the Islamic State insurgent group, because the group was not yet in control of any territory. But now Baghdadi was the head of a government that reigned over much of eastern Syria, and he could impose his will over hundreds of thousands of people, especially those in the Islamic State’s stronghold of Raqqa. Baghdadi ordered Christians to pay a protection tax or face death. Subjects accused of theft had their hands amputated; those accused of adultery were whipped or stoned to death. Although these punishments are found in Islamic scripture, most Muslim countries have abandoned them as outmoded. Even al-Qaida’s leaders had counseled their affiliates to apply the punishments leniently. But Baghdadi viewed imposing the harsh religious laws as a way of legitimizing his new state as “Islamic,” and terrifying the local population into submission. Like Saddam, he understood the political utility of brutality in the name of religion.

In the same vein, Baghdadi labeled Muslims who resisted his rule as apostates. Recalcitrant Sunni tribesmen and captured government soldiers were executed en masse and dumped into anonymous graves, a warning to anyone who would defy him.

His rule in eastern Syria secure, Baghdadi set his sights on seizing adjoining land in western Iraq.