N O ONE PAID particular attention to the boy who haunted his local mosque in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, and Ibrahim Awad never said much to them. When he did, he mumbled, being shy. His father taught Koranic chant there, so in his spare time Ibrahim would do the same, unobserved in some corner, muttering over the holy book. When it came to singing out, though, he would suddenly find his voice, making the words ring through the building. They noticed him then.

In much the same way, over the years, he worked unobtrusively towards leadership of the world’s most feared terrorist group, Islamic State: towards control of an area covering 34,000 square miles, and command over bloody and random attacks as far afield as Paris, Sri Lanka, Florida and Manchester. He moved from one jihadist outfit to another invisibly and with discipline. Although his head was full of lions, unsheathed swords and infidels dying in their own blood, he did not fight. He behaved like a secretary, serving the tea at meetings and fading into the background. One of his aliases was “the Ghost”. When he was not driving by night to meet jihadists, he was finishing his doctoral thesis on medieval Koranic recitation. But in June 2014, in the pulpit of the Grand Mosque in Mosul, the city his forces had easily overrun only days before, he once more found his voice. Now that IS had territory—the city of Raqqa, too, had fallen to him—he declared a Sunni caliphate and himself Caliph Ibrahim, the most pious, the warrior, the reviver, who would take Baghdad and lead his mujahideen as far as Rome. He not only spoke, but posted his sermon on YouTube. The world noticed him then.

He also surprised those who thought they knew him, the family man and keen footballer, living for years in a garret by the Tobchi mosque and teaching children there. Obviously he had been galvanised by the American invasion and his imprisonment in 2004 at Camp Bucca, where he taught the other yellow-clad inmates so serenely that his crusader-captors thought him no threat, and let him out. But his interest in the strict imposition of Islamic law came earlier. At university, prompted by an uncle, he had joined a jihadist-Salafist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Long before that in the Samarra mosque he would devoutly clean and sweep, aware that his ancestors had won respect for doing that task. He would chastise his neighbours for their un-Islamic smoking, tattoos, or dancing with women. Friends called him “The Believer”, and he could unsettle them with his stare long before he had power enough to order the killing of anyone who defied him.

Time and again his Mosul sermon nodded to history and to the Prophet. That was the difference he, a scholar, made to the jihadist movement. He was not an engineer like Osama bin Laden or a doctor like Ayman al-Zawahiri, both leaders of al-Qaeda. He brought intellectual weight, as well as the membership he claimed in the Qurayshi tribe, descendants of the Prophet. When he spoke at Mosul he wore black robes to evoke the Abbasids, the most powerful caliphs of early Islam. His nom de guerre, coined earlier, anticipated this day: Abu Bakr, the first caliph after Muhammad’s death; al-Baghdadi, the Abbasids’ capital. The caliphate itself was ordained by Allah, the ultimate means for the ever-bickering Arabs to unite as a holy nation. They had forgotten it. He would build it.

From the moment he had joined al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2005, he had global aims. When, the next year, it re-formed into Islamic State of Iraq, he became its propagandist: at first in Nineveh province, then as far as he could get. In 2010 he became its leader; by 2013, he relaunched it as plain Islamic State; by 2014 he had broken from al-Qaeda, rejecting Mr Zawahiri’s orders to stay in Iraq. There was too much to do in Syria as it collapsed: coalitions to pursue, fighters to recruit, oilfields and hostages to seize to provide a revenue stream. Assiduously he drew up dossiers of local police and potential donors, looking out for anyone useful, as he had made use of Baathists and Saddam’s former officers in Iraq. Meanwhile he targeted flaunters of Islamic law, in beach resorts or nightclubs, no matter. Each strike seemed to draw young men and some young women too, from all corners, to follow the black “I testify” flag. By bold leaps and bounds his potential caliphate grew.

In the cities he conquered he set up offices to take in taxes and traffic fines, register babies and licence marriages, as in a proper state. He imposed the sharia in which he was expert: hands hacked off for stealing, whippings for drunkenness, adulterous women stoned. He also expanded it, justifying everything smoothly with holy writ. Unbelievers were expelled or killed if they did not pay their taxes. Yazidis were driven from their homes and their women abducted to be sold and raped with organised efficiency. Enemies were crucified, burned alive, drowned in cages, beheaded with slow saws, while everything was filmed and posted online for the world to observe and dread. He sometimes shared the videos first with the kufr women he kept chained in a nearby room for his own pleasure. Raping an infidel woman was a spiritual exercise that brought a believer close to God.

While all this went on he was still hidden, still constantly on the move. Visitors who wished to see him were stripped of all devices, blindfolded and driven for hours to a blank room, where he would softly sermonise. Many intelligence agencies declared him dead, but they were wrong. He made audio exhortations, and in 2019 showed himself again, congratulating his fighters for the Easter church bombings in Sri Lanka that had killed 290 people. Now, like bin Laden, he had a Kalashnikov as a prop. His caliphate had crumbled away, but he fortified his followers by invoking the Battle of the Trench in 627, when Muhammad with 3,000 men had prevailed against a force of 10,000, and had pulled his Ahzab rivals over to his side. He appealed to the soldiers of the caliphate to fight like that, to the last drop of blood.

Muhammad had dug a trench to frustrate his enemies. Caliph Ibrahim had dug a tunnel, but it was dead-ended, and he had to deploy his suicide-vest to make himself disappear. ■