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Bin Laden protege reportedly leading Islamic State after injury to caliph al-Baghdadi that Pentagon denies happened

Apr 23, 2015 12:02 pm By Robert Spencer

al-BaghdadiCan we believe what the Pentagon tells us? No. So the fact that they’re saying he wasn’t injured means nothing. He may really have been injured. However, if their objective is to make Obama’s airstrikes look good, and it obviously is, then why would they say al-Baghdadi was not injured if he was? It is more likely that the Iraqi government adviser al-Hashimi is trying to make his own government’s actions against the Islamic State look good by running with the injury report.

“Report: A former physics teacher is now leading ISIS,” by Pamela Engel, Business Insider, April 23, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

A former physics teacher from Mosul has been installed as a new temporary leader for the terror group Islamic State after its leader was reportedly injured in an air strike in March, an Iraqi government adviser told Newsweek.Newsweek describes Abu Alaa Afri as a “rising star” within Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh), and the Iraqi government adviser, Hisham al Hashimi, said he has become even more important that the injured “caliph” of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“More important, and smarter, and with better relationships. He is a good public speaker and strong charisma,” Hashimi told Newsweek. “All the leaders of Daesh find that he has much jihadi wisdom, and good capability at leadership and administration.”

Afri will reportedly become ISIS’s new permanent leader if Baghdadi dies, according to Hashimi. He is reportedly a follower of Abu Musaab al-Suri, a prominent jihadi scholar, and used to teach physics in the northwestern Iraqi city of Tal Afar.

Having a caliph with a background of religious education is important to ISIS, which has shaped its self-proclaimed “caliphate” around a strict interpretation of sharia law. The group recruits people to come live in its territory in Iraq and Syria by marketing it as an Islamic utopia.

Der Spiegel reported recently that early leaders of ISIS, many of whom are former Iraqi intelligence officers from ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, decided to make Baghdadi caliph because he, as an “educated cleric” who “would give the group a religious face.”

Afri reportedly became Baghdadi’s right-hand man after Baghdadi took a step back from decision-making for security reasons, Newsweek reports. He has served as a link between ISIS’s top leaders and its lower ranks and helps with coordination between the upper ranks and the emirs in different regional provinces.

Osama bin Laden reportedly tapped Afri to run Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor, after the death of senior officials in 2010, according to Newsweek. Afri became a senior member of the group and was known to be “very strict,” Hashimi said.

Newsweek reports that Afri is thought to desire reconciliation with Al Qaeda and its affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front, a chief rival of ISIS in Syria….

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that nearly all of ISIS’s leaders are former Iraqi officers, not foreign fighters. The foreign fighters have proved valuable for ISIS’s media strategy – the group used the now-infamous “Jihadi John,” a British extremist, in some of its beheading videos to gain more attention from the West – but seem to have so far been kept out of the upper echelons of leadership.

ISIS’s leaders operate largely in the shadows. Since rising to power as the leader of ISIS, Baghdadi has rarely appeared on video and few photos of him have been released.

The Pentagon has denied reports of Baghdadi’s injury. US defense officials told The Daily Beast that the air strike that reportedly wounded him was not aimed at a high-value target and that they “have no reason to believe it was Baghdadi.”

Martin Chulov at The Guardian reported that the strike targeted multiple cars in the town of Baaj in northwestern Iraq, and that officials didn’t know that Baghdadi was in one of the cars.

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Filed Under: Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) Tagged With: Abu Alaa Afri, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Hisham al Hashimi, Pentagon


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Comments

  1. Brian says

    Apr 23, 2015 at 12:06 pm

    “A former physics teacher”….That says it all.

  2. Don McKellar says

    Apr 23, 2015 at 12:20 pm

    As long as Baghdad Barry is in the White House, the official government line on anything Islam related must be completely suspect and considered unreliable. He has demonstrated that on dozens of occasions.

  3. Jack Diamond says

    Apr 23, 2015 at 5:26 pm

    “He is reportedly a follower of Abu Musaab al-Suri…” That would be the al-Qaeda theorist-idealogue ‘The Syrian’ who authored “The Call to Global Islamic Resistance”. Al-Suri started in the Muslim Brotherhood, joined bin Laden in Afghanistan; set up sleeper cells all over Europe; trained his prize pupil Zarqawi who became leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and then AQ in Iraq morphed into ISIS. Referencing al-Suri further cements the links of the Islamic State to the earlier generation of the global jihadi movement.

    A reminder then of what al-Suri (and therefore Afri) thinks:
    “Here is the world filled with oppression and injustice under the guidance of America and its Jewish masters…events are tumbling towards the appearance of the Mahdi. He will emerge to lead the confrontation and fill the earth with justice… the successful attack by the nineteen martyrs against the heartland of the infidel and the tyrannical abode, America, which hit her in the heart of her economic and military structure was by any measure an historic and monumental action.. (it) set the battle on its right course by forcing the confrontation between us and our true, eternal enemy, America.

    “There is a war established and imposed on us by our enemy that, in accordance with the requirements of our religion, we are obliged to fight. Defensive jihad has become a duty imposed upon all Muslims. As God (Allah) said ‘Slay them wherever you catch them and turn them out from where they have turned you out for persecution is worse than slaughter.”

    “The modern Crusader-Jewish, American-led campaign against the Arab and Islamic world has clearly announced its goals: total elimination of the civilizational, religious, political, economic, social and cultural existence of Muslims…the most insolent, malevolent, barbaric attack in history…(that depends) on complete cooperation from the overwhelming majority of the current Arab rulers…there is not a single Muslim land that is not occupied at the hands of various sorts of unbelieving Jews, Crusaders and others, including the Chinese…the individual obligation for jihad has spread to all Islamic people…the heartlands of dar al-Islam are indirectly occupied by the Crusaders and Jews through the stewardship of apostate rulers who have placed their armies at the service of the infidels.

    “If we are to confront them we have two choices. We can enter the battle according to the expectations of our enemy, scattered and exhausted, and waste our energies in conflicts with the apostate rulers and the hypocritical, accursed and ignorant ones, which is what we did for more than thirty years in failed and costly campaigns. Or else we can orient the battle toward the primary enemy and the prime mover of all our local enemies, and by this I mean the evil trinity, Israel-America-Europe…the battle against the Jews, America and Europe is obligatory…(but) the sole method that presents itself (in light of American military-technological dominance) is war by secret bands of disconnected cells that are both varied and abundant.

    To Muslims: “living in the lands of the infidels is not permissible unless that is his only choice, or for a legitimate reason pertaining to jihad against the infidels in their country in defense of Muslim land…second, we should warn Muslims who live in Western lands and other countries at war with Muslims and are allied with America in the invasion of our lands, that the war has started, it will continue for a long time, and its ferocity is increasing…whoever has joined and protected the infidels in their lands for pleasure and has become one of them is a traitor and is corrupt.”

  4. katarzyna says

    Apr 23, 2015 at 8:23 pm

    ”Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones”(Rumsfeld)
    Slavoj Žižek adds a fourth category, the unknown known(things we intentionally refuse to admit).
    My proposition:
    known knows – Abu Bakr is not fictional character. We can’t believe what the Pentagon tells us.
    known unknowns – is he injured/dead? ”if their objective is to make Obama’s airstrikes look good, then why would they say al-Baghdadi was not injured if he was?”
    unknown knowns – ”what difference does it make?” the Pentagon has five sides(of every story)
    unknown unknowns – someone knows?

  5. Sam says

    Apr 23, 2015 at 9:47 pm

    I still can’t understand how we became a nation where we can not trust Pentagan, our generals, FBI, State Dept, CIA, President, Congress, Senate, you name it and they all seem to be helping the enemy instead of wiping it off the face of the earth.

    I guess we Americans became lazy and did not pay attention that the enemy, Islam was spreading all over again. God help us.

    • Jack Diamond says

      Apr 23, 2015 at 10:26 pm

      You said Islam was the enemy. The others you mention do not. That’s part of your answer.

  6. Ming the Merciless says

    Apr 24, 2015 at 4:37 pm

    Looking at the Chinese “Yellow Turban” rebellion during the Warring States period, putting prophets at the head of large armies never end well…All them Turbans got killed after losing all the battles…

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