In aftermath of Isis’s toxic mix of chaos and intolerance, new spheres of influence are being demarcated

Reports of his death had been frequent – and exaggerated. But not this time. Even as US forces were flying to Iraq the remains of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in Syria in the early hours of Saturday, a debate about his legacy was stirring.

For more than five years, Baghdadi, who was known by birth as Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, was the most wanted man on the planet – a figure who had turned an already potent post-invasion insurgency in Iraq into a formidable terrorist juggernaut that changed the course of history.

In the time he led the Isis terror group, Baghdadi succeeded in shredding the authority of Iraq and Syria and testing the borders of the entire Middle East – all the while eluding the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and militaries.

A darkness rapidly descended as the black flags of Isis were planted across the region. Security states were exposed as fragile husks, unable to withstand Baghdadi’s intimidating enforcers as they overran one town after another, imposing an implacable seventh century world view on those who dared to remain, or had no chance to flee.

Play Video 0:57 Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed in US raid – video

Mosul was the first to fall, its capture used by Baghdadi to proclaim the formation of a new caliphate on the lands of northern Iraq. Soon it spread to Raqqa, and to the east of Aleppo. The Iraqi Kurdish capital of Irbil was in the group’s sights, so too the oil city of Kirkuk, and very nearly Baghdad.

As the dominoes tumbled, Isis gathered momentum. Its toxic mantra of doctrinal intolerance took root in some areas, but in others it forced populations to flee en masse. Communities that had co-existed since the dawn of millennia were uprooted and are yet to return. Tented shanty towns of the displaced remain dotted across the Kurdish norths of Iraq and Syria a testament to an upheaval which could take generations to be reversed.

By mid last year a momentum that had seemed unstoppable had begun to slow. In Iraq, militia groups that had fought alongside the Iraqi army had clawed back all major cities. In Syria, Kurdish proxies of the US had recaptured Raqqa and nearly all the territory Isis had seized. The rest was retaken earlier this year in a painstaking push near where it all began for the forerunners of Isis, along the Euphrates River basin.

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From the town of Baghuz emerged tens of thousands of Isis fighters and followers, most bedraggled and beaten. Some defiant. The remnants of the group have since been in detention centres in eastern Syria, or Iraqi prisons – their fate uncertain, as is that of much of the land they controlled.

While Donald Trump can credibly claim that Isis no longer controls any contiguous land, there have been clear signs over recent months that cells on both sides of the river are beginning to reassemble. Security in eastern Syria remains brittle, as does the region’s body politic.

The US decision to abandon the Kurds who fought on their behalf is unlikely to bring stability to a still volatile area, where the stark realities exposed by the Isis rampage remain just as troubling in defeat. The ground war was won by non-state actors who fought on Iraq and Syria’s behalf. The national armies of both countries splintered in the face of the threat and are yet to fully regroup.

Isis took hold in the vacuum of the 2003 US invasion, which had ousted the Sunni ruling class in Iraq and diminished the status the sect held in society. The group positioned itself as a champion of the disenfranchised – willing to reclaim lost glories and restore Islamic precepts. A sense of Sunni grievance was central to its message, and it readily tapped into the fortunes of Sunnis elsewhere; in Lebanon, whose patron Rafik Hariri was assassinated in 2005 and in Syria, where the anti-Assad opposition was primarily drawn from the same sect.

Profile Who was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Show Hide Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is thought to have been born in the central Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971. Though a weak student, whose poor eyesight disqualified him from joining the Iraqi military, he rose to command al-Qaeda’s Iraqi division and then broke away to form Islamic State (Isis). In July 2014, shortly after Isis said it had established a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Baghdadi delivered a sermon from a mosque in the captured Iraqi city of Mosul. Appearing unmasked for the first time, he declared himself to be the caliph: the political and religious leader of the global Muslim community. His declaration was roundly rejected by almost all Islamic religious authorities but his caliphate became a magnet for thousands of foreign fighters and women. The group attempted not just to hold territory but to administer it like a state, establishing a brutal justice system, collecting taxes and doling out public services. Baghdadi had been seen publicly on one other occasion, in an 18-minute video released in April this year. From 2016 he had a $25m bounty on his head. He had been reported to have suffered serious injuries in airstrikes over the years, and there had occasionally been speculation that he had been killed, but he continued to resurface in audio tapes and videos. He killed himself in October 2019, while under attack from US forces. Michael Safi Photograph: -/AFP

Then and now, the narrative resonated with some who otherwise disavowed the hardline theology that Isis used as a driving force. Baghdadi’s ability to evade his pursuers had amplified that appeal, something which his violent death, cornered in a tunnel far from home, may help diminish.

But the huge disruption and grievances the group caused remain raw and largely unresolved. The naked failings of authority in the region are in many ways just as troubling. Weak political governance offers few guarantees of justice or reconciliation. Perceived losses are unlikely to be recovered anytime soon.

Instead, a new regional order is taking shape that underpins the tremendous chaos Isis has caused. New areas of influence are being demarcated and there is now a real chance that some of the region’s post second world war borders could be redrawn along ethnic sectarian lines.

In Syria’s volatile east, large restive populations of Isis detainees remain interned where, for the past six months, they have been able to reorganise. The new Isis camps are bigger and more combustible than the US versions in southern Iraq, where Baghdadi earned his stripes as a future leader during a nine month stint in 2004. Back then, he was able to convince his captors that he was a stabilising influence, and they let him go. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was anything but. He lived and died as one of the savage and influential figures of modern times.