Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi apparently is alive and is developing a long-term strategy to indoctrinate children and recruits — inside Iraq and Syria and also abroad, through the internet — in hopes of keeping the terrorist group active despite being mostly destroyed by U.S.-led forces.
"Even as they were losing Mosul and Raqqa, we were seeing indications that they were planning to operate anew, as a clandestine organization," Nicholas Rasmussen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told The Washington Post for a Saturday report.
"As they were being driven out of these places, they were leaving behind a kind of cell structure," he said.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are convinced that Baghdadi is alive and is strategizing as the shrinking numbers of ISIS fighters try to hold onto its remaining strongholds in eastern Syria, the Post reports.
"By all indications, he’s alive," a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the newspaper. "We think he’s still coordinating, still helping to run the organization."
Officials also cite intelligence intercepts and interrogations with detainees, along with writings and statements by operatives within the terrorist group’s network.
"The leadership is convinced that, even if the State has disappeared, as long as they can influence the next generation through education, the idea of the caliphate will endure," one self-proclaimed ISIS operative told the Post, who had been reached through an encrypted messaging service.
Under Baghdadi, "the values of the caliphate would be seeded in the Umma [Islamic community], and not disappear," the operative said, "even if the caliphate would."
Baghdadi, who is about 46 and is from the Iraqi city of Samarra, has been photographed only once, in July 2014, and has since spoken publicly only a handful of times, the Post reports.
On July 4, 2014, Baghdadi entered a Mosul mosque and declared the establishment of the Islamic State — and he has been reported killed or gravely injured at least a half-dozen times since then.
He was said to have died in three different aerial bombings, the Post reports, carried out by Russian or U.S. warplanes.
Other media accounts have claimed that he had been arrested by Syrian troops, fatally wounded in an artillery strike, and poisoned by assassins.
The Pentagon dismissed reports by a Russian official last June that Moscow was nearly "100 percent certain" of Baghdadi’s death, for lack of confirming evidence.
U.S. officials have more recently expressed confidence that Baghdadi survived ISIS' defeat in Mosul and Raqqa and remains active, though his exact whereabouts are unclear.
Since 2015, ISIS has suffered a brutal string of military defeats, but Baghdadi has been "remarkably silent," the Post reports, "never appearing in public to rally his forces and only occasionally releasing an audiotaped message encouraging his troops to fight on."
The last such video surfaced on Sept. 28, 2017, about two weeks before Raqqa fell.
Rasmussen, formerly of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Post that the campaign to destroy ISIS was slow enough to give Baghdadi plenty of time to regroup and prepare for the future.
"They knew this was happening," he said. "It wasn’t as though they had a theory of victory where they were going to hold Mosul and Raqqa forever.
"But the narrative that has underpinned the Sunni extremist project — whether it’s al-Qaida or ISIS — is that the mantle is going to be picked up and advanced by some other set of actors.
"The project may not be tied to the Syria conflict," he added, "but it’s not going to go away just because ISIS is defeated on the battlefield."
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