ISIS Names New Leader and Confirms al-Baghdadi’s Death https://nyti.ms/324Lhru
ISIS Names New Leader and Confirms al-Baghdadi’s Death
Almost nothing is known about the new leader of the Islamic State, including who he really is. The group’s announcement also warned America not to be happy.
By Rukmini Callimachi and Eric Schmitt | Published October 31, 2019 Updated 4:51 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 31, 2019 |
Days after the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his heir apparent were killed in back-to-back attacks by United States forces in northern Syria, the group broke its silence on Thursday to confirm their deaths, announce a new leader and warn America: “Do not be happy.”
In an audio recording uploaded on the Telegram app, the Islamic State mourned the loss of Mr. al-Baghdadi, who led the organization for nearly a decade, and its spokesman, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, who was killed a day after Mr. al-Baghdadi and who had widely been considered a potential successor.
The audio recording was the first word from the Islamic State confirming the death of its leader, which President Trump triumphantly announced on Sunday as a huge blow to the world’s most fearsome terrorist group.
Mr. Trump and Pentagon officials said Mr. al-Baghdadi had blown himself up with a suicide vest, also killing two children, after he had been cornered on Saturday in a dead-end tunnel during an American military raid in a northern Syrian village. Mr. al-Muhajir was killed on Sunday in an airstrike elsewhere in northern Syria.
Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death came eight months after American-led forces in Syria seized the last remnants of the territory once held by the Islamic State, which at its height spanned an area the size of Britain across parts of Syria and Iraq.
The Islamic State announcement said that Mr. al-Baghdadi had been succeeded as leader by Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi, whom it identified as the “emir of the believers” and “caliph.”
Almost nothing is publicly known about Mr. al-Qurayshi, including his real name, and counterterrorism analysts were scrambling Thursday to try to figure out who he is.
“Nobody — and I mean nobody outside a likely very small circle within ISIS — have any idea who their new leader ‘Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi’ is,” Paul Cruickshank, editor of the CTC Sentinel at the Combating Terrorism Center, said in a tweet on Thursday. “The group has not yet released any meaningful biographical details which might allow analysts to pinpoint his identity.”
Daniele Raineri, a journalist and analyst who has been studying the Islamic State’s leadership structure for more than a decade, said that ISIS leaders often acquire a new nom de guerre with the appointment to a new position, meaning Mr. al-Qurayshi may have had a completely different name last week.
The al-Qurayshi appellation at the end of his name indicates that he is being portrayed as a descendant of the Quraysh tribe of the Prophet Muhammad, a lineage that the Islamic State considers to be a prerequisite for becoming a caliph, or ruler of a Muslim theocracy.
Its use indicates that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, continues to see itself as a caliphate — even if one with practically no territory.
“It shows that while the world is ready to pronounce the Islamic State dead and finished, the group’s core leadership continues to believe it can operate much as it has in the past,” said Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization in New York.
“The suggestion is that nothing changes, allegiance should still be to the leadership, and affiliates and franchises should continue to look to al-Qurayshi for guidance on how to operate,” he said.
The announcement, in a seven-minute, 37-second recording, was coupled with a warning to the United States not to gloat over killing Mr. al-Baghdadi, who oversaw beheadings of American hostages and other atrocities.
“Do not be happy America, for the death of Sheikh al-Baghdadi, and do not forget the cups of death at his hands, may God accept him,” the announcement said.
It boasted of the group’s disciples and expansion beyond the Middle East, even as its core territory in Iraq and Syria was reduced to nil: “Don’t you see America that the State is now on the threshold of Europe and Central Africa?”
Records of wire transfers and the testimony of captured fighters in the Democratic Republic of Congo indicate that ISIS has set up a base of operation in the Central African country.
The announcement also took aim at the leadership of Mr. Trump, admonishing the United States: “Don’t you see how you became the laughingstock of the nations, and an old and crazy man controls your fate, whose opinion changes between morning and evening?”
The announcement implied that the Islamic State hierarchy had convened in order to discuss the successor question and suggested that he had been handpicked in advance by Mr. al-Baghdadi: “The sheikhs of the mujahedeen agreed, after consulting with their brothers and acting upon the recommendation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to pledge allegiance to the sheikh and mujahid, the scholar, doer and worshiper Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi,” the announcement said.
Devorah Margolin, a senior research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism, said that the fact a shura, or governing council, had selected the new leader “shows the ISIS bureaucracy is still in place. “ She added: “We should not underestimate them.”
The announcement also called upon supporters to pledge allegiance to the new leader, a ritual that took new meaning under Mr. al-Baghdadi’s reign, as attackers around the world recorded video pledges of fealty to the caliph before carrying out killings.
Counterterrorism officials said to expect in the coming weeks a string of videos pledging allegiance from ISIS affiliates in Afghanistan, Sinai, the Philippines and other far-flung insurgent hot spots.
“This will possibly be followed by a message from the new leader,” said Laith Alkouri of the business risk consulting company Flashpoint Global Partners, who monitors the group’s online messages. “He’s inherited the burden of leading the group and he needs to put on a show to maintain the morale of the support base.”
Mr. Clarke added, “This selection of the new leader is a way for ISIS to link its past with the future it will promise its adherents and followers.”
Intelligence officials and analysts were trying to make sense of the announcement and to place the announced successor among the known cadre of the Islamic State. Some speculated that Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi may be a new nom de guerre of Hajji Abdullah, who appears in recently recovered internal Islamic State records archived by Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher.
“It could be to create confusion or for operational security reasons,” said Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The recent announcement by the State Department of a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture was a sign of the importance that the United States placed on him.
Besides the new leader, the Islamic State announcement also proclaimed a new spokesman, identified as Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi, again using a name indicating a lineage from the Prophet’s tribe, and setting up another potential successor.
“Those names are the most generic names I can think of in a long time,” Mr. Raineri said. “This trick is obfuscating on purpose the possible links to people we know.”
Karam Shoumali, Evan Hill and Rick Gladstone contributed reporting.
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Islamic State group names new leader to replace Baghdadi
By Sarah Dadouch, Asser Khattab and Joby Warrick | Published October 31 at 1:09 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 31, 2019 |
BEIRUT — The Islamic State militant group Thursday announced the successor to its former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who U.S. officials said killed himself by detonating a suicide vest during a raid last week on his hiding place in northwest Syria.
A recording released by the Islamic State’s media arm confirmed Baghdadi’s death and named his successor as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qorashi.
“Do not rejoice, America, in killing Sheikh al-Baghdadi,” a spokesman said on the recording, which was disseminated on the group’s social media channel. “Do you not realize that the [Islamic] State stands today at the doorsteps of Europe and Central Africa? Nay; it is expanding and persisting.”
The new leader was chosen by the Islamic State’s Consultative Council after they had confirmed Baghdadi’s death, the audio statement said. It did not give any details about the new leader but said that a previous spokesman for the group had also been killed in the U.S. raid.
“Do you not see how you have become the laughingstock of the nations,” it said, addressing the United States, “your destiny ruled by an old fool who goes to sleep with one opinion and wakes with another?”
Baghdadi’s death was widely seen as a blow to the Islamic State, which swept across large areas of Iraq and Syria beginning in June 2014 and eventually took control of territory the size Britain. The group, also referred to as ISIS, terrorized towns it ruled into submission and carried out attacks overseas under the leadership of Baghdadi, an Iraqi national.
Counterterrorism experts said the new leader’s name was possibly a pseudonym, accorded to Baghdadi’s successor at the time of his succession.
With the appointment, the Islamic State appears to be again choosing a figurehead with the scholarly credentials and ancestral lineage that justifies a claim to the title “caliph.” The name “Hashimi” denotes a descendant of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe, to which the prophet Muhammad also belonged. The Islamic State’s official statement also refers to the man as a “scholar.”
Baghdadi, also a claimed descendant of the Banu Hashim clan, was regarded as an Islamic scholar, having studied Islamic jurisprudence at the University of Baghdad and served as an imam. Among the Islamic State’s hard-line adherents, those qualifications gave him standing to claim to be the true “caliph” who could lead the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
“We see the group again emphasizing scholarly credentials,” said Cole Bunzel, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute. “It also invoked the example of the first generations of Muslims in describing the selection process for selecting a new caliph. In Sunni Islam, generally speaking, there are two recognized legitimate ways to appoint a new caliph: by designation by the current caliph, or by selection by a group of qualified men. The latter was the case here.”
Mainstream Sunni Muslim authorities have long rejected Baghdadi’s teachings as a perversion of Islam. The Islamic State’s announcement Thursday came amid reminders of the group’s irrelevance to many in the Middle East — at a moment when Arab countries, including Iraq and Lebanon, are gripped with popular, anti-government protests that also explicitly reject appeals to religious sectarianism, a hallmark of the Islamic State.
The Islamic State’s stunning rise began with a lightning advance across territory in northern and western Iraq as the country’s military forces retreated. A U.S.-led campaign to beat back the militants lasted years and relied on Iraqi soldiers and militiamen as well as a Kurdish-led force in Syria.
Towns and cities occupied by the Islamic State suffered twice: from the militants’ brutal rule, and from what human rights groups said was a frequently indiscriminate U.S.-led air campaign that killed thousands of civilians and reduced parts of Syrian and Iraqi cities to rubble.
Even after that campaign, the Islamic State has proved durable, carrying out attacks as Iraq and Syria — weakened by political turmoil or civil war — struggled to respond. Other factors have made the Islamic State’s resurgence more likely, experts said, including the harsh detention conditions of thousands of Sunni Muslims accused of membership in the group or collaborating with the militants.
In Thursday’s recording, the group said it would exact its retribution for the deaths of its members but did not specify how.
Warrick reported from Washington. Kareem Fahim in Istanbul contributed to this report.
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Islamic State vows revenge against U.S. for Baghdadi killing
By Hesham Abdulkhalek, Ulf Laessing | Published October 31, 2019, 11:38 AM ET | Reuters | Posted October 31, 2019 |
CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamic State confirmed on Thursday that its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a weekend raid by U.S. special forces in northwestern Syria, and vowed revenge against the United States.
The Iraqi rose from obscurity to lead the ultra-hardline group and declare himself “caliph” of all Muslims, holding sway over huge areas of Iraq and Syria from 2014-2017 before Islamic State’s control disintegrated under U.S.-led attacks.
The group confirmed his death in an audio tape posted online and said a successor, identified as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi, had been appointed.
Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher at Swansea University focusing on Islamic State, said the name was unknown but could refer to a leading figure in Islamic State called Hajj Abdullah, whom the U.S. State Department had identified as a possible successor.
A former senior figure in the rival Islamist group al Qaeda in Iraq, he is also known as Mohamed Said Abdelrahman al-Mawla.
Analysts have also named the Saudi Abu Abdullah al-Jizrawi and Abdullah Qaradash, an Iraqi and one of Baghdadi’s right-hand men, as potential successors along with the Tunisian Abu Othman al-Tunisi.
An Islamic State spokesman warned the United States in the tape to “beware vengeance (against) their nation and their brethren of infidels and apostates”.
Baghdadi’s death is likely to cause Islamic State to splinter, leaving whoever emerges as its new leader with the task of pulling the group back together as a fighting force, according to analysts.
Whether the loss of its leader will in itself affect the group’s capabilities is open to debate. Even if it does face difficulties in the transition, the underlying ideology and the sectarian hatred it promoted remain attractive to many, analysts say.
GUERRILLA ATTACKS
Islamic State also confirmed the death of its spokesman Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir.
“I think they’re trying to send the message, ‘Don’t think you’ve destroyed the project just because you’ve killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the official spokesman’,” Tamimi said.
Islamic State has resorted to guerrilla attacks since losing its last significant piece of territory in Syria in March.
Since Baghdadi’s death, it has posted dozens of claims of responsibility for attacks in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
H.A. Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International peace, said the group, also known as ISIS or Daesh, would have picked the name Quraishi for Baghdadi’s successor to suggest descent from the Prophet Mohammad’s tribe.
Baghdadi’s “caliph” name also ended in Quraishi.
“ISIS is trying to show its followers it respects that tradition, but Muslims more widely aren’t likely to care very much, considering the wide violations of Islamic law that ISIS has clearly engaged with,” Hellyer added.
In his last purported audio message, released in September, Baghdadi said operations were taking place daily and urged freedom for women jailed in Iraq and Syria on suspicion of links to the group.
He also said the United States and its proxies had been defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the United States had been “dragged” into Mali and Niger.
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Islamic State group announces successor to al-Baghdadi
By Associated Press | Published October 31, 2019 | AP | Posted October 31, 2019 |
BEIRUT (AP) — The Islamic State group declared a new leader Thursday after it confirmed the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi days earlier in a U.S raid in Syria.
In its audio release by the IS central media arm, al-Furqan Foundation, a new spokesman for IS identifies the successor as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi — tracing his lineage, like al-Baghdadi, to the Prophet Muhammad's Quraysh tribe.
It provided no other details about al-Qurayshi and it was not immediately clear who the name was in reference to. The group typically identifies its leaders using noms de guerre that refer to their tribal affiliation and lineage. Those names often change.
The speaker in the audio also confirmed the death of Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, a close aide of al-Baghdadi and a spokesman for the group since 2016.
Al-Muhajir was killed in a joint U.S. operation with Kurdish forces in Jarablus in northern Syria on Sunday, hours after al-Baghdadi blew himself up during a U.S. raid in Syria's northwestern Idlib province.
The killings were a double blow to the extremist group, nearly seven months after its territorial defeat in Syria.
The new spokesman, named Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi, urged followers to pledge allegiance to the new "caliph" and addressed the Americans, saying: "Don't rejoice."
"The Shura Council met immediately after confirming the martyrdom of Sheik Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The leaders of the Mujahedeen agreed after consultation with their brethren and acting according to the will (of al-Baghdadi) they pledged allegiance to Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi as the new leader of the Believers."
The new IS leader is identified as a scholar, a well-known warrior and "emir of war" who has battled American forces and knows "its wars."
"So don't rejoice America for the death of Sheik al-Baghdadi," the speaker said. "Don't you know America that the state (IS) today is at the doorstep of Europe and is in Central Africa? It is also expanding and remaining from east to west." The speaker was referencing the slogan IS used at the height of its successes: "Remaining and expanding."
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Death of ISIS Leader Is Scant Consolation to a Changed France
The Islamic State’s crimes, and the fear they instilled, have long since woven themselves into the fabric of French life.
By Adam Nossiter | Published October 31, 2019, 5:37 AM ET | New York Times | Posted October 31, 2019 |
PARIS — The killing of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was met this week with no outpouring of joy or even relief in France, even though this is the European country that suffered most from his depredations.
The reason is simple: the Islamic State’s crimes, and the fear they instilled in the national psyche, are so ingrained in France that the daily fabric of life has been inexorably altered.
As if proof were needed, within the last month, a former far-right candidate shot two Muslims who stopped him from burning down a mosque. A Muslim mother was reprimanded by an official for wearing a head scarf. And President Emmanuel Macron called for a “society of vigilance” after a Muslim employee at Police Headquarters in Paris killed four officers in a knife attack.
These recent symptoms of what some call an ongoing trauma for France demonstrate why Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death was ‘‘no more than a step,” as Mr. Macron put it Sunday in a muted reaction to the news.
The demise of the terrorist leader did nothing to heal the wound that the Islamic State opened in French society with the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. Every day, in the persistent mutual fear and suspicion that exists between France and its large, imperfectly integrated Muslim minority, the wound festers.
In a survey published Sunday by IFOP, a respected polling firm, in the Journal du Dimanche, 61 percent of respondents said that Islam was “incompatible with the values of French society,” an increase of 8 percent over February. Nearly 80 percent said they felt that the vaunted French creed of secularism was “in danger,” largely because of Islam.
The wound existed well before the Islamic State attacks of November 2015 at the Bataclan and elsewhere in Paris. But the massacres perpetrated by al-Baghdadi’s foot soldiers — roughly 1,700 French citizens joined the Islamic State, of whom perhaps 700 were fighters — exacerbated the split between France and its Muslims.
The massacres also amplified the scope of judicial and police control over French society, and created a far more receptive climate for tough police repression. That was evident in this year’s gloves-off handling of the Yellow Vest protesters, which was largely accepted by the French despite thousands of wounded.
There is dispute in France about the extent of the civil liberties rollback since the terrorist attacks. A prominent constitutional lawyer and sometime-adviser to Mr. Macron, François Sureau, published a much-discussed pamphlet last month in which he lamented the “crumbling of the legal edifice of liberties” in France, partly because of 2015.
Other experts call this an exaggeration.
But there is no doubt that the mood has remained tense since Mr. al-Baghdadi unleashed his agents on France four years ago. There are few calls for the state to lighten its grip. The attack of November 2015, in which 131 died, changed France, and the country’s leaders have benefited from popular recognition that new circumstances required new methods.
“It’s clear that it had an extremely powerful traumatic effect, which has inserted itself into the debate associated with Islam in France,” said Zaki Laïdi, a political scientist at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, who was an adviser to France’s then-prime minister, Manuel Valls, at the time of the attacks.
Another adviser to Mr. Valls at the time, Chloe Morin, now at the IPSOS polling firm, said, “There’s a diminished tolerance toward Muslims now.”
But the attacks only exacerbated an already troubled relationship between France and its Muslim population, nearly all agree.
“The attacks heightened this climate of fear regarding Islam,” said Tareq Oubrou, an imam in Bordeaux who is a leading proponent of a reformist strain of Islam. “The ordinary citizen makes no distinction between terrorism, Islamism and sectarianism,” he said.
The existing difficulties, pre-2015, between France and French Muslims were “considerably amplified by the wound that France suffered, of course,” said Mr. Laïdi.
“It was a massive shock, this huge eruption of the Islamist presence,” he said.
In the prime minister’s office, “they said to themselves, ‘How will the country manage this shock?’” Ms. Morin recalled.
The government they both served quickly imposed a state of emergency.
It survives in part to this day, codified permanently in French law by Mr. Macron — the very measures deplored by civil libertarian jurists like Mr. Sureau.
The most notable of these measures allow for expanded and renewable house arrests of persons under suspicion, searches without judicial warrant, and the imposition of electronic bracelets. Mr. Sureau, in his pamphlet, wrote that “the state of emergency was 6,000 searches for 40 arrests, of which 20 were for excusing terrorism.”
But there was little sustained opposition to the new measures, either when they were first imposed or later enacted into law.
Mr. Laïdi observed that “the immense majority of French don’t feel that their civil liberties are threatened” — and the evidence for that is the stillborn debate over the harshness of police tactics in response to the violent Yellow Vest demonstrations. Scattered protests led to nothing.
Mr. Sureau, the lawyer, himself won several important appeals of emergency measures at France’s Constitutional Council, the equivalent of the Supreme Court, including one that criminalized looking at “terrorist” websites — proving, in the eyes of his critics, that civil liberties in the country are in good shape.
“Historically, the French demand protection from the state,” said Mr. Laïdi. “The attacks only reinforced that expectation.”
Yet the muted reactions in France to two recent policy balloons floated by Mr. Macron show that despite the attacks of 2015, the French are not ready to tighten the screws further and become a full-bore national security state.
Mr. Macron issued his call for a “society of vigilance” after the October killings at Paris Police Headquarters, enjoining the French to be “on the lookout at school, at work, in places of worship, close to home” for signs of radicalization among fellow citizens.
The idea fell flat and there has been no follow-up.
For the French elites, Ms. Morin of IPSOS observed, it sounded too much as though the president was calling on citizens to snoop on and denounce one another. For some, the chief of state appeared to be renouncing a traditional government role in France, providing protection.
Vexed by the sharp rise in asylum seekers, Mr. Macron earlier had sounded a warning about immigration, in a speech to members of his own party.
“Are we to be the bourgeois party, or what?” Mr. Macron asked. “The bourgeois don’t have to deal with immigration. It’s the poorer districts that are on the receiving end,” he said. “We don’t have the right not to look this issue in the face.”
Again, public reaction was unenthusiastic to what was seen in his own party as the equivalent of harsh, far-right rhetoric on immigration.
For some political analysts, the legacy of 2015 is mixed: heightened public awareness of risks, but unwillingness to forsake traditional French liberties.
“There was a consciousness-raising,” said Mr. Laïdi of Sciences Po. “But there’s no xenophobia,” he said. “French society is extremely attached to individual liberty.”
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