Shadowy leader of Daesh Al Baghdadi is a ruthless murderer who happens to love football

Beirut: Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the shadowy leader of Daesh, is more than just a ruthless murderer. He is a ruthless murderer who loves football.

According to a Daesh militant who spoke to Gulf News via a proxy, Al Baghdadi is a “bad sport who does not like to see others win”.

In 1989, Al Baghdadi, a teenager at the time, settled in Baghdad with his family. They rented a small apartment in the overcrowded middle class neighbourhood of Al Tobaji in northwest Baghdad.

The lower middle class district housed a school for the blind, a local jail and popular market, but Iraqis knew it for something else: football. Al Tobaji was a hotbed for football fans, and two of its natives were prominent Iraqi sports commentators Asa’ad Lazem and Raed Nahi, while a third, Abdul Wahab Abu Al Hail was a celebrated midfielder who played for the national team. Inspired by Abu Al Hail, Al Baghdadi went as far as to create a football team for mosque regulars, designating himself the captain.

He joked with friends, saying that he was Iraq’s Maradona.

Abu Mohammad Al Jolani, the founder of the Al Qaida-affiliated Jabhat Al Nusra, is also a football fanatic (he roots for Real Madrid) as was the notorious ‘Jihadi John’, the British executioner who was reportedly killed in US air strikes earlier this month.

It was reported that during the 2014 World Cup, Syrian troops and rebels would sometimes halt fighting to watch the games together.

In August 2014, Daesh executed an Egyptian at a football stadium in Libya, with a shot to the head.

This November, football stadiums were the target of two attacks in France and Germany. One was pulled off, of course, and the other was thwarted.

-Sami Moubayed is a Syrian historian and former Carnegie scholar. He is also author of “Under the Black Flag: At the frontier of the New Jihad”