Cairo: The leader of Daesh urged followers to burn their enemies everywhere and target “media centres of the infidels,” according to an audio recording that the extremists said was by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
The reclusive leader of Daesh, who has only appeared in public once, also vowed to continue fighting and lavished praise on his fighters for their valour in the battlefield — despite the militants’ loss of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in July.
The recording was released on Thursday by the Daesh-run Al Furqan outlet, which has in the past released messages from Al Baghdadi and other top figures of the extremist group. The voice in the over 46-minute-long audio sounded much like previous recordings of Al Baghdadi. His last previous purported message was released in November, also in an audio recording.
Russian officials said in June there was a “high probability” that Al Baghdadi had died in a Russian air strike on the outskirts of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital. US officials later said they believed he was still alive.
Al Baghdadi’s whereabouts is unknown but he is believed to be in Daesh’s dwindling territory in eastern Syria. The Daesh-held cities of Raqqa and Deir Al Zor are under siege and likely too dangerous for him to hide in. Some Daesh leadership is believed to have gone to the nearby town of Mayadeen, and the group still holds a stretch of the Euphrates River from Deir Al Zor to the Iraqi border, as well as remote desert areas along the border.
Al Baghdadi also spoke of what he called the United States’ waning global power, saying Russia was taking advantage of that to cast itself as the super power replacing America. Russia, he added, was in full control of the “Syrian file.”
Citing examples of America’s perceived weakness, he referred to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and “North Korea’s nuclear threat against America and Japan.” Al Baghdad’s reference to North Korea’s tussle with Washington and Tokyo over Pyongyang’s nuclear and long-range missile programmes suggests that his message was recently recorded, perhaps in the past month or two.
At the peak of its power in 2014 — when the Iraqi army crumbled amid the militants’ blitz — Daesh controlled about a third of both Syria and Iraq but has steadily lost ground in the face of a US-led coalition that has backed Iraqi forces as well as Kurdish-led Syrian fighters battling the extremists across the border in Syria.
Forces loyal to Syria’s Bashar Al Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, have also driven Daesh out of significant territory.
The loss of Mosul was a deep symbolic blow to Daesh — it was after the group overran the city in June 2014 that the militants declared a so-called caliphate stretching from northern Syria deep into the north and west of Iraq. And it was from Mosul’s famed Al Nouri Mosque that Al Baghdadi made his only public appearance at a Friday sermon, declaring the so-called caliphate and calling on Muslims the world over to follow him.
At the time, he vowed that IS would conquer “Rome,” and the entire world.
Mosul was also the bureaucratic and financial hub of Daesh. Raiding Mosul’s central bank, and taxing and extorting the city’s wealthy inhabitants, made Daesh the world’s richest terrorist organisation. Mosul’s vast industrial zones were converted into factories for weapons and explosives.
