Why Baghdadi Risked a Video Appearance
ISIS faces dangers as an organization that are more significant than the ones Baghdadi does as an individual.
With a new video, the Islamic State’s long-elusive leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has reemerged. His message was simple: ISIS’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria has fallen, but the global community forged by ISIS lives on. That makes his video something of a rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s December claim that ISIS was “defeated.”
The first question to ask about the video is: Why release it? Baghdadi has been, for almost five years, a ghost, that showed him speaking at outweighed that risk. And that’s surely because ISIS faces dangers as an organization that are more significant than the ones Baghdadi does as an individual.
