Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

46 years old, revealed himself for the first time in a video released on the Internet on July 5, 2014. At the Al Nuri mosque in Mosul (ISIS blew it up in 2017) he announced the birth of the ‘Caliphate’, His organisation was quickly gaining new territories in Iraq and Syria back then. Forty one minutes of audio material published on September 28, 2017 was the first Caliph’s appearance after nearly a year. Information about his supposed death was announced many times before. In the aforementioned material Al-Baghdadi calls to attack Western media and continue jihad against the crusaders from the West, without whom local forces would not have been able to cope with ISIS.

Where are the ISIS fighters?

About 40,000 people from around the world came to Syria and Iraq a few years ago with guns in their hands to support the making of a self-proclaimed caliphate. Nowadays the fate of most of them is unknown.

Although there is no more ‘Caliphate’, ISIS is still a potential threat

The fighters of a self-appointed ‘Caliphate’ were pushed into the desert. Some of them still remain in eastern Syria, in a small area in the west of Syria near the border with Israel, in Jordan and in western Iraq. This is less than 5 percent of the territories ISIS controlled in 2014 and 2015. However, […]