The world’s most wanted and reclusive terrorist, the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, reëmerged on Monday, for the first time since 2014, in an eighteen-minute video designed to rally the thousands of followers who still heed his call on at least four continents. The tape was clearly designed to prove that neither he nor his Islamic State has been obliterated, a month after losing the last piece of their caliphate, in Baghouz, Syria. “The war of Islam and its followers against the crusaders and their followers is a long one,” Baghdadi told a group of followers sitting with him on the floor of a bare, whitewashed room. An AK-47 rifle was perched by his side. “Our battle today is a war of attrition to harm the enemy, and they should know that jihad will continue until doomsday.”

The video of Baghdadi seemed designed to refute President Trump’s claim, in February, that the U.S.-led coalition of more than seventy nations had eliminated the Islamic State “one hundred per cent.” Baghdadi claimed that ISIS offshoots—or “provinces,” as they are dubbed—have carried out ninety-two attacks in eight countries, even as its fighters were losing territory in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. currently has a bounty of up to twenty-five million dollars for information leading to Baghdadi’s arrest. He is believed to be hiding somewhere in the desert along the Syria-Iraq border, probably on the Iraq side, according to U.S. officials and leaders in the Syrian Democratic Forces militia that have retaken ISIS territory.

The video, released by Al Furqan, an Islamic State media group, marked only the second time that Baghdadi has appeared in public since he transformed an Al Qaeda franchise in Iraq into the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and proclaimed a caliphate from the pulpit of the al-Nuri Mosque, in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014. The video was not dated, but it appeared to have been recorded recently. In it, Baghdadi congratulated the perpetrators of the Sri Lanka attack, which he claimed was retaliation for the loss of Baghouz, and cited the protest movements in Algeria and Sudan that recently ousted those countries’ long-standing leaders.

“This is the first video of Baghdadi for nearly five years, and it comes at a crucially important time for a terrorist organization emerging from a territorial defeat in its Syria-Iraq heartlands,” Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told me. He said that ISIS was, “attempting to re-assert itself as a global movement capable of conducting major attacks around the world.”

The tape puts to rest reports of Baghdadi’s death and repeated rumors that he was severely injured. In 2017, Russia claimed to have killed the self-declared ISIS caliph in an air strike. Baghdadi instead “appears perfectly fit, apparently well-fed, and confident enough to appear on video,” Lister, the author of “The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency,” said. The new video is striking only for two differences from Baghdadi’s last appearance—today he is fatter, and his beard is longer and grayer, with the bottom half dyed red.

Baghdadi has repeatedly surprised the outside world, beginning with his revival, in Iraq, of the Al Qaeda franchise, which had been forced underground and had only a few hundred followers in 2007. Over the next seven years, he converted the jihadi movement into the Islamic State caliphate, with tens of thousands of fighters recruited from more than eighty countries. He has eluded capture while more than a hundred other ISIS leaders have been picked off in U.S. air strikes.

“Baghdadi’s survival despite a massive manhunt and the successful military campaign is impressive,” Daniel Byman, a Brookings Institution scholar and the author of the new book “Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad,” told me. “It shows the Islamic State retains functioning networks and considerably clandestine capacity in Iraq and Syria.” The video was “a way for him both to continue his claim to the leadership of the jihadist movement and to give his followers heart in what is a dispiriting time for them.”

Baghdadi claimed that the underground movement is expanding, even as it loses turf. He congratulated two groups, in Mali and Burkina Faso, for recently pledging formal allegiance to ISIS and “enrollment in the ranks of the caliphate.” He praised its Burkina Faso branch for its attack on French forces and called specifically for more attacks against France, as well as other “crusader” nations, a reference to Christian or Western countries. Toward the end of the video, Baghdadi reviews reports of ISIS operations around the world, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist activities globally.

“One thing in particular stands out in terms of looking forward,” Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the founder of the Web site Jihadology, said. “When the video highlights the various areas Abu Bakr is being briefed on, it shows a folder that says Wilayat [Province] Turkey.” ISIS has not embraced a formal franchise in Turkey, so the reference “suggests potential future targets and willingness to possibly begin an insurgency or attempt to take territory there,” Zelin said.

On Monday, the U.S. intelligence community was analyzing the tape for authenticity, a State Department official told me. The Trump Administration is still claiming that it has the upper hand. “ISIS’s territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria was a crushing strategic and psychological blow, as ISIS saw its so-called caliphate crumble, its leaders killed or flee the battlefield, and its savagery exposed,” the official said. But he acknowledged that “this fight is not finished.”

Middle East experts and terrorist specialists were more cynical. “The international community should not kid itself—ISIS remains a serious force, even in Syria and Iraq,” Lister, the fellow from the Middle East Institute, told me. “In eastern Syria alone, ISIS appears to have conducted over eighty-five attacks since the loss of Baghouz, its final picket of territory. That’s no small feat. Thousands of fighters remain in operation, and the scale of the problem ISIS has left behind far eclipses what the U.S. left behind in Iraq, in 2010.” ISIS, he added, has existed and thrived without territory for longer than it controlled land. “I don’t think ISIS is desperate at all but supremely confident that they’ve set into stone conditions in which its future is now secure.”