Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died during a raid by United State forces. Photo / AP
Before the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State had decentralised, allowing followers and franchises to carry out its violent ideology on their own.
He had been hunted for more than a decade, and the organisation he had built was designed partly on the assumption this day would come.
The violent death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, in a raid by US forces announced Sunday by President Donald Trump, is a significant blow to the world's most fearsome terrorist group. But analysts said it was unlikely to freeze attempts by Islamic State franchises and sympathisers around the world to sow mayhem and fear in the name of their extremist ideology.
Under al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State largely ran on its own. While he demanded fealty and built a cult of personality around himself — followers considered him the leader of Muslims worldwide — he was obsessed with security and is known to have given subordinates considerable latitude to act autonomously. Numerous references in Islamic State propaganda offer reminders that its leaders may come and go, but the movement remains.
After all, the founder of the Islamic State and two successors were killed before al-Baghdadi became its leader and vastly expanded the group's sway in the Middle East and beyond.
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And in his final years, al-Baghdadi stuck to such strict safety measures that he was believed to have been surrounded by a small circle of direct contacts, including wives and children and a few trusted associates. He limited communications with the outside world, according to US and Iraqi intelligence officials, which meant his organisation operated with sparing input from him, lessening the practical effects of his demise.
"For sure it is important, but we know from what we have seen from other organisations that getting rid of the leader does not get rid of the organisation," said Hassan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian expert on extremist groups. "Isis has created a new structure that is less centralised, and it will continue, even without al-Baghdadi."
Just in the past year, the group has claimed responsibility for deadly attacks in Afghanistan including a mosque bombing that killed more than 70 people; a wedding blast that killed 63; a shooting at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, that killed five people; a Cathedral bombing by an Islamic State affiliate in the Philippines that killed 22 people; a string of bombings in Sri Lanka that killed more than 250 people; and other attacks in Russia, Egypt, Australia and elsewhere.
Omar Abu Layla, a Syrian who heads an activist news network called Deir Ezzour 24, said he expected al-Baghdadi's death would demoralise some followers while enraging others who would seek to avenge him.
"Some of the cells in Europe and the West could try to carry out attacks to show that 'Even without al-Baghdadi, we will continue,'" he said.
Trump's triumphal announcement that al-Baghdadi "died like a dog" in northern Syria's Idlib province came as the Islamic State had shown signs of reconstituting in remnants of its self-proclaimed caliphate, which once spanned a swath of Syria and Iraq before it was destroyed by US-led forces in March.
But even as the military campaign chipped away at the Islamic State's caliphate, the group was branching out, founding and supporting new franchises and cultivating relationships in Afghanistan, Libya, the Philippines, the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere.
While the branches followed its ideology, they largely operated independently, plotting attacks on local security forces, seizing control of territory or parts of cities and battling other extremist groups for resources. Most were seen primarily as threats to their own countries or their neighbours, but US officials worried that some franchises, like those in Afghanistan or Libya, could oversee attacks in the West.
Although the Islamic State may now be a shadow of its former self, a recent report by an inspector general for the US-led operation against it estimated that the organisation still has between 14,000 and 18,000 members in Iraq and Syria, including up to 3,000 foreigners. But the report noted that estimates varied widely and that the group maintained an extensive worldwide social media effort to recruit new fighters.
As the Islamic State moved away from a centralised command structure to a more diffuse model, it also intensified calls on operatives acting alone or in small groups to plan and execute their own attacks, which were then amplified by the organisation's media network.
Under this strategy, anyone, anywhere could act in the group's name. That multiplied the Islamic State's lethality by remotely inspiring attacks, carried out by disciples who had never set foot in a training camp. They were responsible for deadly assaults ranging from a shooting at an office party in San Bernardino, California, to a rampage by a van driver in Barcelona, Spain.
While little is known about how al-Baghdadi spent his last months, he appeared in a video released in April, sitting cross-legged on a cushion with an assault rifle by his side and praising the Sri Lanka church bombers.
In a voice message released last month, he praised the "soldiers of the caliphate" for fighting despite the group's losses.
"They are still attacking their enemy, and they did not run away, and they were not weakened by what afflicted them, nor did they make peace with their enemies," he said, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist messaging on the internet. "The wheel of attrition is running smoothly, by the grace of Allah, and on a daily basis and on different fronts."
The Islamic State itself did not immediately comment on al-Baghdadi's fate, and terrorism experts said his death could set off a succession struggle among subordinates. US drone strikes and air raids have decimated the group's top ranks, and it was not immediately clear who could possibly replace him.
"There are few publicly well-recognised candidates to potentially replace al-Baghdadi," said Evan Kohlmann, who tracks militant websites at the New York security consulting firm Flashpoint Global Partners.
Less than a day after al-Baghdadi was killed, one of his potential successors, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, who had been the Islamic State's spokesman, was killed in a strike further east, according to Mazlum Abdi, the head of a Kurdish-led Syrian militia. US officials could not immediately confirm whether al-Muhajir had been killed.
The Islamic State has repeatedly reconstituted itself after its leaders were killed. In 2006, the United States killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of a predecessor group to the Islamic State, and in 2010, it worked with Iraq to kill the head of the Islamic State of Iraq, paving the way for al-Baghdadi's ascension and the creation of the Islamic State in 2013.
Al-Qaida, an Islamic State rival, also survived the killing of founder Osama bin Laden in 2011. Its operations also have become more diffuse in recent years, with affiliates in different countries operating somewhat independently.
The Islamic State has typically taken hold in dysfunctional societies, where war, sectarianism and the absence of state structures have created fertile ground for its message among some Sunni Muslims.
Analysts caution that while the group was largely defeated militarily in Iraq and Syria, few of the issues that fueled its emergence have been addressed.
New waves of protests against government corruption are shaking Iraq, and the government has made only limited progress in rebuilding towns and cities destroyed in the effort to oust the jihadis.
And Trump's decision to withdraw at least some US troops from northeastern Syria set off new violence there and raised fears about the security of Islamic State prisoners held in makeshift prisons and camps run by Kurdish-led forces.
"This raid will not eliminate the debate about the president's decision to withdraw our forces from Syria," said Dan Hoffman, a former CIA officer. "This raid for sure is a great success. We removed a key terrorist leader from the battlefield. But there are a lot of ISIS terrorists enjoying ungoverned space in the region, Isis decision-making is decentralised, and al-Baghdadi will have a successor."
The group's franchises and affiliates also remain active elsewhere.
In Iraq, current and former counterterrorism generals, intelligence officials and strategists said that al-Baghdadi's death would not fundamentally cripple the group, which is already reasserting itself in the country's northeast.
"It is not the end, but the beginning of a new era, a new age under a new name of a new kind of terrorism," said Maj. Gen. Ismail Almahalawi, a veteran of fighting the Islamic State and its predecessors.
Several times a week, Iraqi authorities receive reports of attacks on villages and local mayors, Iraqi security officials said. Recently an entire village fled after Islamic State fighters threatened it. And many mayors have been killed in the last year for refusing to cooperate with Islamic State cells.
In Afghanistan, an Islamic State offshoot has expanded in the country's east since its formation in 2015. Despite repeated US-led offensives and the dropping of the US' largest conventional bomb in 2017, the group has attracted more than 2,000 recruits.
In Nigeria, an affiliation with the Islamic State has reinvigorated a branch of the group previously known as Boko Haram, and US officials now rank it as one of the biggest extremist threats in Africa.
In Libya, a civil war has allowed Islamic State fighters to regroup in the country's southern desert. This month, the US military said it had carried out four drone strikes in the area from a base in Niger to disrupt its resurgence, killing 43 Islamic State fighters.
"We saw a regeneration of the Isis capability," Col. Chris Karns, a spokesman for the US military's Africa command, told Voice of America on Friday. He said the United States did not want Libya to "become a laboratory for Isis."
Written by: Ben Hubbard, Rukmini Callimachi and Alissa J. Rubin
Photographs by: Ivor Prickett and Laura Boushnak
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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