Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph from a pulpit in Mosul and was dead five years later in a tunnel in Idlib. He was born Ibrahim Awad al-Badri near Samarra, took a doctorate in Quranic recitation in Baghdad, and was by every account an unremarkable student who was known in his neighbourhood mainly as a footballer. The American invasion made him. He was interned at Camp Bucca in 2004 for about ten months as a low-level detainee, in a camp that held thousands of men together and let them organise, teach and recruit; a significant share of the later leadership of the Islamic State met there, and former Baathist officers dismissed by the de-Baathification order supplied the military competence the movement had lacked. He took over the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda in 2010 after its leaders were killed, rebuilt it during the Syrian war, and broke with al-Qaeda entirely in 2014. On 29 June 2014 his organisation declared a caliphate across the territory it held in Syria and Iraq, and days later he appeared in the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul in black robes to claim the title - the only time most people ever saw him. The sermon was filmed and distributed, which was the point of giving it. What followed was governed territory rather than an insurgency: courts, taxation, schools, a currency, and the systematic enslavement of Yazidi women, which the United Nations has called genocide. The territory was retaken by 2019. He blew himself up during an American raid in Idlib in October of that year, and the mosque where he had declared the caliphate had already been destroyed by his own men.
- Lived: 1971 CE – 2019 CE
- Nationality: Iraqi
- Roles: military, religious_leader
