Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Is Dead (But His Legacy Lives on)

Michael Rubin

Security,

In short, Trump and U.S. forces deserve congratulations for ridding the earth of the murderous would-be caliph. But to believe the forces which propelled him to power and infamy will dissipate with his death would be naïve. 

President Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday morning that U.S. forces killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the early morning hours in a raid on his hideout in Syria’s Idlib province. Baghdadi reportedly detonated his suicide vest as U.S. forces approached, killing himself and his wives; his children reportedly survived.

Baghdadi’s death is certainly a victory, although it does not affirm Trump’s reasoning for his precipitous withdrawal from much of northeastern Syria nor his abandonment of the U.S. partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Indeed, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi said in an email shortly after confirmation of Baghdadi’s death that the operation against the Islamic State leader was the result of five months’ “joint intelligence work” between the SDF and U.S. forces.

Nor does Baghdadi’s death mean the threat posed by the Islamic State is over.

In 2006, Matthew Philips—at the time a reporter for Newsweek (he currently is an editor at CNN)—wrote a contemptuous essay entitled “Bush’s New Word: ‘Caliphate’” in which he castigated the president for even citing the term. “The beauty of ‘caliphate’ is that no one but students of Islamic history have much more than a vague idea of what it means,” Philips wrote. Not only did the president err by dredging up a historical term with little relevance to the present day, he implied, but Bush was also wrong to ascribe a negative to a concept with roots in the golden age of Islam.

In hindsight, of course, Bush was right to understand that the concept of caliphate had deep resonance in the Islamic world. Baghdadi’s July 2014 public sermon in Mosul, Iraq, in which he declared himself caliph did not resurrect the concept, but merely tapped into something which many Muslims craved, hence his ability to attract within months fighters from more than 100 different countries.