The roots of the rise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in a raid by US special forces on the last rebel redoubt of Idlib province in north-west Syria on 27 October, are to be found – as is so much of contemporary radical Islam – in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Back then, he fought alongside al-Qaeda in Iraq and was briefly detained, with other future Isis leaders, in Camp Bucca, a sprawling prison facility run by the US near the Kuwaiti border. While he is thought to have been born in northern Iraq in 1971, the third of four sons, and to have lived quietly as an unexceptional religious scholar, Baghdadi’s background is hazy; even his real name is subject to conflicting explanations. This uncertainty would become an asset in the years to come.
Although Baghdadi’s predecessors had all sworn an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda’s leadership, they regularly defied the central command and control structure of the movement. The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led al-Qaeda in Iraq from 2003 and was known to have a difficult relationship with the central command because of his brutality and sectarianism. He stretched the group thin by prioritising a war against Iraq’s Shia community ahead of fighting the Western coalition forces. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who was then al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, wrote to Zarqawi and told him to refocus his efforts on fighting British and American troops. Zarqawi ignored this, explaining that he was closer to the conflict and that al-Qaeda’s central leadership could not appreciate the realities he faced on the ground.
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