Iraq News Now

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The self-styled Islamic State, on Monday, released a propaganda video of its fugitive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It marked his first appearance, since declaring the terrorists’ now-defunct caliphate five years ago.

The 18-minute video from the Al Furqan network includes 12 minutes of Baghdadi, seated, with an AK-47 behind him, speaking to three masked figures, sitting, along a nondescript wall, in a nondescript room.

The figures along the wall scarcely move, and say nothing, as Baghdadi spoke, talking mostly about the group’s losses and the men who died in its last territorial stronghold of Baghouz in Syria.

“God ordered us to jihad,” Baghdadi told the three silent men, along the wall to his left, “but not to victory.” He acknowledged the Islamic State’s defeat in Baghouz, but claimed it “showed the savagery, brutality, and ill-intentions of Christians toward the Muslim community,” while it revealed “the bravery, patience and resistance of the Muslim nation,” which “terrified the hearts of the crusaders and increased their hate against Muslims.”

Baghdadi’s claims are remarkable. Only a tiny fraction of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims were members of the Islamic State or supporters of its violent and extreme interpretation of Islam.

Moreover, in the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria, the overwhelming majority of its forces were Iraqis and Syrians, fighting over local issues. As Entifadh Qanbar, an Iraqi-American who heads the Future Foundation in Washington, told Kurdistan 24, “This is about politics, not praying.”

Hence, the Kurdish leadership has repeatedly stressed the need to address the underlying causes of Sunni Arab support for groups like the Islamic State: above all, the failure of the Baghdad government to address their needs and represent their concerns.

Speaking about Syria, Dr. Frances Brown, of the Carnegie Endowment, told Kurdistan 24 much the same: “ISIS feeds off a sense of grievance, political exclusion, abusiveness,” and “within the Syrian context, it can often be very specific and locally entrenched.”

A terrible irony is that a large part of those Sunni Arab communities that embraced the Islamic State as the solution to their problems now lie devastated. East Mosul, where Baghdadi first announced the so-called caliphate, remains largely uninhabitable, littered with rubble and IEDs left behind by the terrorist organization to block and delay any return to normalcy.

Moving away from Iraq and Syria, Baghdadi criticized the popular uprisings in Sudan and Algeria. “It is sad to see that people in those countries did not know why they revolted and what they wanted,” he said. “Whenever they topple a tyrant, they replace it with a worse one who is more criminal towards Muslims.”

Headvised that “jihad” was the only solution to “tyrants,” without defining what the term meant, beyond the violence and brutality of the Islamic State.

“Jihad is the only way to protect dignity, and the sword is the only way to stop those tyrants from their tyranny,” he said. “I call on those people to return to God and follow the legitimate ways in changing the regimes and tyrants.”

That Baghdadi would even make such an appeal suggests the Islamic State has few supporters in those two countries.

THREATENS REVENGE

“Our battle today is a war of attrition to harm the enemy, and they should know that jihad will continue until doomsday,” Baghdadi stated. “As long as their brothers are alive, they will not forget the sacrifices of those people we mentioned and the brothers will take revenge for them.”

He then described recent attacks in Syria and Libya as revenge for the loss of Baghouz, adding—in audio, but not on the video, as if this segment was included later—the Easter morning assaults on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka.

Baghdadi claimed there had been 92 operations in eight countries. Those are dubious figures, with Baghdadi, apparently, trying to make the Islamic State appear still to be a dangerous threat, with a long arm.

The attacks in Sri Lanka, which killed over 250 people, were the most devastating of the assaults, and Baghdadi called them revenge “for your brothers in Baghouz,” while he thanked God “there were Americans and Europeans among them”—although the bulk of the casualties were Sri Lankan and that predominantly Buddhist country has been most affected.

Baghdadi also claimed that groups in Burkina Faso and Mali had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

“We ask them to intensify their attacks on the crusader France and their allies and avenge their brothers in Iraq and the Levant,” he said.

Prior to 2012, neither Mali, nor Burkina Faso, both of which are former French colonies, had a problem with extremist Islam or jihadi groups.

Yet the US has been waging a war against Islamic extremism since 2001. For some, like Paul Davis, a former Pentagon analyst and now a Senior Fellow at Soran University, the spread of the jihadi threat to places like Mali and Burkina Faso suggests there is something fundamentally wrong with the US approach to the problem.

“If Muslims have an issue,” Davis told Kurdistan 24, “they may well express it in religious terms. But instead of seeing it for what it is, we assimilate it into some abstract concept, like the ‘global jihad.’”

There is a millennial-old conflict between herders and farmers in that part of Africa, which straddles the Sahara desert and reaches into the greener areas to the south.

The herders live in the predominantly desert areas and tend to be Muslim. The farmers live in the greener south and tend to be Christian or animist.

There is a fight over scare resources in desperately poor countries, but so little do Americans (and many others) bother to understand the problem, “they assimilate this, too, into the ‘global jihad,’” Davis complained—“and play into the hands of figures like Baghdadi.”

Indeed, the highly regarded German magazine, Der Spiegel, published an article in 2015, based on documents captured from the Islamic State. Entitled, “Secret Files Reveal the Structure of the Islamic State,” the report, a leak from German intelligence, revealed that the core of the Islamic State was the former Iraqi regime.

In October 2004, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was leaving office, he told The Atlantic Monthly something similar:

Almost no one says the real problem is that Saddam never surrendered. And even though he was captured, his people never surrendered. His organization is still operating as though they have a chance to win, and they're allied with people who want to help them win—by which I mean the jihadis on the one side and the Syrian Baathists on the other.

Political leaders in the Kurdistan Region have stressed that the Islamic State in Iraq consists, overwhelmingly, of local people, pursuing local issues, rather than some grand religious adventure.

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But, as Davis complained, “Almost nothing seems to change the simplistic stereotype that Americans have about the nature of this violence.”

Finally, the video of Baghdadi released on Monday seems to conclude with a threat to Turkey. For the first time in the video, Baghdadiappears to speak with the three figures who have been sitting silently at his side.

The man closest to Baghdadi hands him a series of folders, most of which he glances at and puts aside. Particularly, as this is a propaganda video, we have no idea of the purpose of this. It could even be intended to make Baghdadi appear in charge of events, when he is not.

One folder reads “Wilayat of Turkey,” that is province of Turkey. Ankara earlier supported the Islamic State, but now the terrorist organization appears to be threatening its former benefactor.

Editing by Laurie Mylroie