michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: The life and death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. My colleague Natalie Kitroeff talks to Rukmini Callimachi about the man who created ISIS. It’s Tuesday, October 29.

natalie kitroeff

Rukmini, who was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

rukmini callimachi

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the caliph of the Islamic State. He was the leader of this terrorist group that, at its height, controlled territory the size of Great Britain in Iraq and Syria, that drew in tens of thousands of recruits from 100 countries — 40,000, we believe — and that succeeded in carrying out attacks not just in Iraq and Syria, not just in Paris and Brussels, but in a total of — at the last count, I had 40 different countries around the world.

natalie kitroeff

So how does one become that? How do you become the leader of a caliphate?

rukmini callimachi

What my reporting has shown is that it’s actually not what people say it was. People think that he was radicalized at Camp Bucca in the year 2004, which is right after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, when Baghdadi is picked up in a raid that was, in fact, aiming to get his brother-in-law. He is taken to an American facility, Camp Bucca. And in Camp Bucca, the theory goes, he rubbed shoulders with the future leaders of the insurgency, and it was there that he became radicalized through those people and through his hatred of the American occupiers. This has been out in biographies of Baghdadi, said by the top analysts who are in this field, but in fact, when you go and speak to the people who were incarcerated with him, you realize that he showed up already radicalized. So in order to understand who he is, you have to back up, and you have to go to, I would say, his childhood and his teenage years.

natalie kitroeff

And what was his childhood like?

rukmini callimachi

He came from a modest family from a village called Al Jallam, in central Iraq. This is a village located in what is known as the Sunni heartland of the country. And crucially, he came from a family that was from something called the Badri tribe in Al Jallam. And the Badri tribe traces its ancestry to the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. Beyond all that, his family chose this one particular mosque that, according to people that I spoke to in that neighborhood, was not just any mosque. It was a Wahhabi mosque. The Wahhabi strain of Islam is one of the most hard-line, the most austere, the most conservative. And early on in his upbringing, you see two things. You see, one, a real propensity towards religion, towards faith. His childhood friends, his classmates all talk about how they would be off on picnics. They’d be doing wheelies with their bikes in the street, and he was at the mosque.

natalie kitroeff

Wow.

rukmini callimachi

And the second thing that you hear about him around adolescence is that he starts to be outspoken when he sees people around him who are in some way violating what he believes to be Islamic law. He gets into a big fight with his next-door neighbor when his next-door neighbor gets a tattoo. Baghdadi was irate about that, and he saw that as a violation of Shariah law, and he let his neighbor know. He got bolder and bolder as he became older. So in his later teenage years, he started to even upbraid and reprimand people, like the owner of the mosque that he attended. This is somebody who was older than him and who was a mentor to him.

natalie kitroeff

Wow.

rukmini callimachi

But he went so far as to chastise that man when he began smoking, telling him, quote, “When you stand up and recite the prayer, the smell of your breath will make the angels fly away.”

natalie kitroeff

It sounds like Baghdadi is getting more and more dogmatic. Is that right?

rukmini callimachi

That certainly seems to be what people around him are noticing, but it’s not yet at the point where it’s really raising red flags. So he graduates high school. We were able to actually get his high school transcript, and from that, we gleaned that he was not a great student. But even though he has his low grades, he manages to get into the University of Baghdad, specifically in their Islamic studies department and their Shariah law department, and he begins a religious education. He doesn’t have a lot of money, and so he’s supporting himself by teaching Quranic classes and, later, by becoming a preacher and an imam at a local mosque. And it’s at this local mosque that another trait of Baghdadi comes to light. People always described him as shy, as reserved, as taciturn, but by this point, he’s now in his early 20s, and these qualities that perhaps were seen as weaknesses when he was a child, they’re now being interpreted as a sign of discipline, a sign of somebody who doesn’t have a loose tongue, who says only exactly what he has to say and nothing more. It’s around this time as well that he creates a soccer team that he becomes the coach of.

natalie kitroeff

Wait, he’s a soccer coach?

rukmini callimachi

He’s a soccer coach, and he was actually a pretty good player, based on what other people said, and I get that there’s some dissonance there. Jihadist groups have, in the past, declared soccer to be something that was haram, forbidden, but there it was. He was a good soccer player. He enjoyed playing soccer. But here’s the twist. I spoke to members of his soccer team, and what’s interesting is they said that they would play soccer. And at the end of the practice, he would call them all together, and at that point, he would start handing out leaflets that were trying to propagate the tenets of Wahhabi Islam. And one young man that I spoke to — he was a teenager back when this occurred — he brought this pamphlet home to his family. And his parents flew into a rage and pulled him from the soccer team, because they saw this as something inappropriate and as something that could be dangerous for their son. So he was out of step, I think, with the culture around him.

natalie kitroeff

And it also sounds like he was, even then, willing to take risks to be spreading these very hardline beliefs.

rukmini callimachi

Right. More and more as he’s becoming an adult, you’re seeing a man who isn’t able to sit on the sidelines and just live his own faith in a private manner. He needs to co-opt people and turn them over to his interpretation of Islam, and he feels a need to police the faith of others, a need to tell others how to be good Muslims, and a need to call out what he perceived as transgressions against that faith.

natalie kitroeff

O.K., so what happens next?

rukmini callimachi

In 2003, America begins an invasion of Iraq with its coalition partners. People were dispersing. Nobody wanted to be in Baghdad at this point in time, because they were expecting that there were going to be strikes and bombardments. He goes back to Samarra, allegedly. And less than a year later, in early 2004, he’s picked up in Falluja at the home of his brother-in-law, who at that point had picked up guns against the American occupation. The way it’s been described to me is that he was essentially picked up almost by mistake. He was a hanger-on to his brother-in-law, who had become radicalized. So the first thing that happens, according to his fellow prisoners, is that he was named the emir of their tent. At Camp Bucca, there were specific tents that had dozens of prisoners each, and he gets named the emir of his tent. And under his emirship, he very quickly starts to incite violence against Shia prisoners that are being held inside this compound, to the point that Shia prisoners who were incarcerated there began to clamor at the gates, asking the Americans to be moved. Once the Shias were mostly removed from his tent, he then turned his attention to his fellow Sunnis, and he began actively policing the way that they practiced their faith. Why is your beard so short? How many times did you pray today? Why didn’t you fast? It’s the middle of Ramadan, and so on. One anecdote that I was told is they caught somebody smoking in their tent, and Baghdadi gave the order that he needed to be held down, and two of his fingers were cut off with a shank that had been made from the metal inside the air-conditioning unit that they had in their tent.

natalie kitroeff

Wow.

rukmini callimachi

Yeah. And interestingly, that punishment, cutting off the two fingers that held the cigarette butt, that is a punishment that I later heard about in Mosul from people who were accused of smoking under ISIS.

natalie kitroeff

So that seems pretty extreme. How rare is this kind of behavior in the camp?

rukmini callimachi

I think it’s very extreme, and I think that it points to an evolution that happened before he got to Camp Bucca, because that’s a pretty out-there place to be, to be doing that kind of thing in 2004 in Camp Bucca.

natalie kitroeff

How does he get out of this camp?

rukmini callimachi

The Americans let him out end of 2004, less than a year after they captured him. Unfortunately, at that point in time, the American-led coalition had far bigger problems.

archived recording (george w. bush) This has been tough weeks in that country. Coalition forces have encountered serious violence in some areas of Iraq. Our military commanders report that this violence is being instigated by three groups.

rukmini callimachi

There was an insurgency that was exploding all over Iraq.

archived recording (george w. bush) Some remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime, along with Islamic militants, have attacked coalition forces in the city of Falluja. Terrorists from other countries have infiltrated Iraq to incite and organize attacks.

rukmini callimachi

Suicide bombs were going off. Hundreds of people were getting killed, and they were busy trying to contain the chaos that had been unleashed in this country.

natalie kitroeff

And he’s not even on their radar screen.

rukmini callimachi

He’s not on their radar screen and, in fact, he very much disappears from view. This is kind of the black hole in Baghdadi’s evolution, where we know the least about this period. But what is clear about this period, when we look back and we start interviewing people who were members of the insurgency, we realize that, in fact, he was working his way up the ranks of the organization all along. I have spoken to members of the Islamic State of Iraq. This is the group that preceded the Islamic State. And already, in 2006, 2007, 2008, you are seeing him in the presence of senior leaders of the group that goes on to be the Islamic State, but he’s there in a support role. He’s an aide. He’s an associate. He’s not the big guy yet. And the first time that he reappears for coalition officials is in 2009, when they do a raid in the house of one of the leaders of the insurgency, and they find a personnel roster that includes the following name, Abu Dua. Abu Dua, we later learn, is the nom de guerre that Baghdadi wore before he took the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And really just a year later, in 2010, the penultimate leader of ISIS is killed, and Baghdadi is named the new leader. He’s taking over, really, what was a flagging and nearly defeated insurgency. According to the C.I.A., they were down to just 700 or so members.

archived recording We want to flag for you tonight what may be an emerging genocide.

rukmini callimachi

It goes on to rebuild itself under his leadership.

archived recording The Islamic army known as ISIS has seized vast territory in Syria and Iraq.

rukmini callimachi

So that by 2014 —

archived recording 1 The leader of the militant group ISIS has called on Muslims throughout the world to travel to Iraq and Syria to help build an Islamic state. archived recording 2 Training camps are open. So is our battlefield, a voice purporting to be that of the leader of ISIS says in this video. Come on, youths of Islam. Let’s take Baghdad together. archived recording 3 And it’s working. Thousands of young men from across the Muslim world have offered their allegiance to a leader whose face they will probably never see.

rukmini callimachi

He and his group have seized an area the size of Great Britain in Iraq and Syria that is now controlling the fates of up to 12 million people.

archived recording From YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to professional infographics and even their own mobile app, the group Islamic State is executing a highly strategic social media campaign to spread its cause. Experts say this level of sophistication is unprecedented.

rukmini callimachi

That has brought in some 40,000 foreign fighters from a hundred different countries.

archived recording (abu bakr al-baghdadi) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

And the moment in July of 2014 when he addresses the citizens of his so-called caliphate —

archived recording (abu bakr al-baghdadi) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

— that marks the first time that he has allowed his face to be videotaped uncovered and open for all to see.

archived recording (abu bakr al-baghdadi) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

And we don’t see him again publicly in a televised address again until this year, 2019, basically just months before his death.

natalie kitroeff

We’ll be right back. Rukmini, what had Baghdadi been doing for the last five years?

rukmini callimachi

So for the last five years, he is never seen publicly in an address to the public, but what we know is that the Islamic State is running. And what is the Islamic State? The Islamic State was, on the one hand, a sprawling administration that provided garbage collection and issued birth certificates and ran its own D.M.V. and ran very much like a state. But the other thing that they were doing is they tapped the tens of thousands of people that they recruited from overseas from a hundred different countries, and they began using those people as, essentially, connectors to those countries in order to start carrying out attacks abroad.

archived recording ISIS took responsibility for last night’s attack, calling the knife men a soldier of the caliphate.

rukmini callimachi

And very quickly we learn that ISIS has created a ritual.

archived recording They released a two-and-a-half-minute video, which they say shows the attacker, whose face is covered, pledging allegiance to the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

rukmini callimachi

And the ritual is that both people who are carrying out acts of violence directed by ISIS and those who are merely inspired by the group record a video —

archived recording (anis amri) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

— pledging allegiance not to ISIS, but to Baghdadi specifically. You see this in the Berlin attacker who used a large truck to run over people.

archived recording (anis amri) [SPEAKING ARABIC]

rukmini callimachi

You see this in the testament of the Paris attackers, who left behind a video pledging allegiance to him.

archived recording (speaker 1) [SPEAKING FRENCH] archived recording (speaker 2) Emergency 911. This is [INAUDIBLE]. You are being recorded.

rukmini callimachi

You see it in the 911 call that Omar Mateen made from the Pulse night club.

archived recording What’s your name? archived recording (omar mateen) My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.

rukmini callimachi

So you see the start of a cult of personality beginning where he is, in a way, invisible. You don’t see him in public anymore. And yet his name is everywhere, on the tips of the tongues of every single one of these attackers.

archived recording What’s your name? archived recording (omar mateen) I pledge my allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, [SPEAKING ARABIC] on behalf of the Islamic State.

natalie kitroeff

So essentially, to his followers, he is ISIS.

rukmini callimachi

That’s right. That’s right.

natalie kitroeff

And so as Baghdadi becomes more infamous, more of a known name, how are U.S. intelligence officials responding?

rukmini callimachi

He becomes the most hunted man in the world.

archived recording 1 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the world’s most wanted man. archived recording 2 The fate of a key ISIS leader is unclear this morning after U.S. airstrikes in Iraq. archived recording 3 U.S. command have been unable to confirm media speculation Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was one of 50 casualties killed in an airstrike near Mosul in northern Iraq. archived recording 4 The U.S. is investigating reports from Russia that one of its airstrikes may have killed the leader of ISIS.

rukmini callimachi

But what’s interesting is that even though there were constantly rumors about Baghdadi being killed, Baghdadi being injured, et cetera, when you speak to the people who were really involved and actually tracking him for the U.S. government, what they’ll tell you is that in all of 2014 and all of 2015 and in all of 2016, there was not a single verified, credible sighting of him. So they completely lost him from view. At the same time, the U.S., which had tried to disengage and leave Iraq, is forced to re-engage as ISIS becomes uncontrollable. U.S. troops return to the theater, first to Iraq and then to Syria. Airstrikes begin in both of these countries. And soon, this tide begins to turn, and ISIS, which had been growing its territory, begins to shrink. And little by little, this area that was the size of Great Britain gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until we get to this February and March, where they were down to just one village, one tiny little place called Baghuz, in Syria. A vicious battle ensues, and eventually ISIS’s territorial caliphate is lost. When it is lost and the village of Baghuz is completely emptied, we realize that he’s still nowhere to be found.

natalie kitroeff

At this point, you’ve got to believe, though, that they’re closing in on him, right?

rukmini callimachi

Look, at this point in time in February, I was six months pregnant, and I made the somewhat extreme decision of going to Syria to cover the war to take back the last village under ISIS rule, specifically because we thought he was going to be there, right? They’ve squeezed them and squeezed them and squeezed them. And having covered this for so long, I just, I couldn’t live with myself with the thought that they were going to capture him in the desert and I would have missed it. But it was pretty anticlimactic when Baghuz finally falls and he’s nowhere to be found. So I end up staying in Syria for almost a month. I’m now close to seven months pregnant. I had to come home, and I come back in early March. March passes. April passes. In April, I have my baby. I start my maternity leave. And in July, we start to hear chatter that they might have found Baghdadi’s whereabouts. And then we don’t hear anything else, until suddenly, this weekend.

archived recording (donald trump) Last night, the United States brought the world’s number one terrorist leader to justice.

rukmini callimachi

What I know is that sometime in the summer, they picked up two key people, one of Baghdadi’s wives and his main courier.

archived recording It appears that the intelligence began to come together late last week.

rukmini callimachi

And these two people were able to provide, during interrogation, enough details that allowed the C.I.A. to then flesh out where he might be hiding.

archived recording And it was at that point commanders went to President Trump, and he made the decision to go after the world’s most-wanted terrorist.

rukmini callimachi

We learned that Delta Forces took off from an air base in Iraq.

archived recording 100 elite U.S. troops in eight helicopters flying in for over an hour.

rukmini callimachi

They flew fast and low over the desert into Syria, and they descended on a compound that had a system of tunnels underneath it.

archived recording Once there, forces blasted a hole through the side of the compound, catching those inside by surprise.

rukmini callimachi

Baghdadi was there.

archived recording Baghdadi fled to an underground tunnel.

rukmini callimachi

He retreated into a tunnel.

archived recording (donald trump) The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, and he had dragged three of his young children with him. They were led to certain death.

rukmini callimachi

He was wearing a suicide vest.

archived recording (donald trump) He reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. The tunnel had caved in on it in addition. But test results gave certain, immediate and totally positive identification. It was him.

natalie kitroeff

So what’s the reaction from ISIS to his death?

rukmini callimachi

The reaction so far has been disbelief. I’m seeing on their message boards, don’t believe it. The Islamic State hasn’t confirmed it yet. He’s been declared dead numerous times before. And, of course, they’re right, but this is the first time that the United States, and not just one political party, but the U.S. military, has announced that they believe that he is dead. So I do think this is a big blow for ISIS. And I would say that in some ways, it might even be a bigger deal than losing the territorial caliphate. The issue is that ISIS became so interwoven with this man through this ritual of having their fighters declare allegiance to him and to him alone. So I think that this is going to be disorienting for their fighters. And in the succession battle that is now most likely going to unfold, we know that, according to their own reading of scripture, in order to be a caliph, you have to be descended from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. There are plenty of militants. According to the Pentagon, there might be as many as 18,000 members of ISIS still remaining just in Iraq and Syria, but only a small number of those 18,000 are directly descended from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. So you now have a much smaller pool of people that you can choose from. Given that the bench is now so obscure, it’s unclear whether the new person is going to be able to rise to the stature and have this cohesive effect over the group, as he had.

natalie kitroeff

Rukmini, if we step back and look at how dramatically the politics in Syria have changed over the past month — we’ve seen the president pulling U.S. troops out, seemingly allowing Turkey to attack our Kurdish partners on the ground. What does this raid mean in the context of that massive shift?

rukmini callimachi

Well, I think that this raid was rushed as a result of the chaos that has now descended on this corner of the world as a result of American foreign policy. I know from my sources that it wasn’t supposed to happen right now, and I know from them that they had to hurry up and get their acts together because of a fear that as American forces pull out, as we lose the human intelligence that we had set up there, that we would essentially lose eyes on him. And so, to me, it feels like we’re seeing a replay of 2011 all over again. In 2011, we thought that this group had been defeated, and American forces pulled out, and they announced that they were pulling out. So the insurgent group knew that all it has to do is sit tight for a little bit, and pretty soon American forces were going to be out of their way, and they were going to be face to face with Iraqi forces who, even though they were well-equipped, were not able to contain what came after. And I think we’re doing exactly the same thing now. We are leaving this area of the world in chaos. We’re taking our eyes off of it. And it’s as if you’ve put a pot on the fire, and at the moment when you turn your back, it’s not yet boiling. But you walk away and go do something else, and 10 minutes later, that pot is going to be boiling.

natalie kitroeff

Thank you so much, Rukmini.

rukmini callimachi

Thank you.

[music]

natalie kitroeff

We’ll be right back.

michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Monday, House Democrats changed course and said they would take a formal vote on an impeachment inquiry, after repeatedly resisting calls for one. So far, the impeachment inquiry has deliberately proceeded without such a vote, inviting criticism from congressional Republicans and President Trump, who claimed that the process is secretive and illegitimate. But it now appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes that there is sufficient support for such a vote that it would give the inquiry greater credibility, and that it would set forth rules for a more public phase of the impeachment, including open hearings. And —

archived recording I need water.

michael barbaro

At least two wildfires in or near major California cities intensified on Monday, forcing large-scale evacuations.

archived recording The sky is on fire right now. Embers raining down all around us now. Look at all the spot fires that just kindled just now.

michael barbaro

The Kincade fire in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, has doubled in size in 24 hours, burning at least 66,000 acres, an area nearly twice the size of San Francisco.

archived recording Get behind him. That’s good. Don’t forget what’s on your left, all right? I want you to knock that down. We want to get in —

michael barbaro