French Intelligence services are checking the authenticity of a video which Islamic State said showed its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but if real it would reinforce that fact that the group is still active, France’s defense minister said on Tuesday.
“The video of al-Baghdadi – the Caliph without a caliphate – is to be considered with caution at this stage. French services are analyzing it,” Florence Parly said on Twitter.
“If this video is authentic, it confirms what we have repeated: Daesh (Islamic State) has no territory, but Daesh has not disappeared.”
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.”
source: Reuters, The New Yorker
