 |
| Al-Baghdadi preaching in 2014 (Photo: AFP) |
Claims suggest the leader of ISIS Abu Bkr al-Baghdadi was killed in an air strike on Saturday.
Heavy artillery was dropped across the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa throughout the day, with footage online posted by ISIS news agency Amaq revealing the devastation caused.
The Islamic State leader has a £20million bounty on his head because his hate-filled sermons inspired suicide attacks across Europe. There have been previous reports of al-Baghdadi's death, which turned out to be untrue.
The revelation has emerged as Iraqi forces claimed al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Ayad al-Jumaili, was killed in an air strike near Iraq’s border with Syria..
Jumaili, an intelligence officer under Saddam Hussein, was described in an Iraqi TV report as Islamic State’s “second-in-command” and “war minister”.
As Iraqi forces besiege al-Baghdadi’s former stronghold in Mosul, the caliphate he declared in the city’s main mosque back in 2014 is crumbling apart.
The film, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: In The Footsteps Of The Most Wanted Man In The World, suggests swifter reactions earlier in the 45-year-old’s rise to power might have brought an end to the IS reign of terror sooner.
Moroccan documentary maker Sofia Amara explains how elite troops from Iraq’s Falcon Brigade missed out on capturing him by just minutes.
 |
| Hidden entrance to al-Baghdadi's bolthole (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
 |
| Arsenal that al-Baghdadi left behind (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
Like Saddam Hussein before him, al-Baghdadi was hiding in a basement bolthole, accessed through a disguised entrance in a tiled floor.
He escaped the hideout in northern Baghdad before soldiers arrived, leaving behind a cache of weapons, documents and black IS flags – the now familiar symbol of the reviled terror network.
The mission’s failure enabled the extremist, born in the Iraqi city of Samarra, to become the world’s most wanted man at the helm of a self-declared caliphate across his home country and neighbouring Syria.
 |
| Elite Falcon brigade at work (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
 |
| Banners and books found in bolthole (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
It also allowed IS to inspire a series of bloody terrorist atrocities.
Western jihadis like Paris grocery store attacker Amedy Coulibaly, and the two French-born militants who slit the throat of a Catholic priest in Rouen last year, have claimed allegiance to IS
Since being filmed apparently preaching from the pulpit inside Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri in July 2014, al-Baghdadi has not been seen in public.
 |
| Entrance to al-Baghdadi's hideout (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
And despite being the target of multiple bombing raids, analysts believe he remains at large.
He was reportedly badly wounded during an airstrike in the same district in March 2015. As with so many stories surrounding al-Baghdadi, what really happened remains a mystery.
In the film, Amara claims she too is holed up near the Iraq-Syria border.
She spent a year following in the elusive footsteps of the man previously referred to by his acolytes as First Emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
 |
| Prisoner of the Falcon brigade (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
Her research brought her into contact with his childhood friends, a former wife and several sex slaves.
The most telling anecdotes came from one of the girls, called Suzanne, who claims she was held as recently as last year. She claimed his home at the time was “like a big whorehouse”.
“There was sex all the time,” she says. “His wives were fighting over who would wear more make-up than the other.
“They used to bring girls for him to have sex with, and he would stay in the house and never go fighting.”
Another girl, who remains in hiding, told Amara she knew kidnapped American aid worker Kayla Mueller.
Kayla, who was abducted in Aleppo in 2013, was reportedly forced to marry al-Baghdadi, who raped her repeatedly. The American was killed in a Jordanian airstrike on IS-controlled Raqqa in 2015.
Those who knew al-Baghdadi as a child paint a very different picture.
 |
| Family's old home in Baghdad (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
He came from a poor family living in the Tobji suburb of northern Baghdad.
A talented footballer, friends nicknamed him “The Maradona of Tobji”.
Another described the young al-Baghdadi as a “nice boy”, who was funny and shy. Determined to do well under Saddam Hussein’s regime al-Baghdadi dreamed of becoming a lawyer but failed to secure good enough grades. He focused his attentions on the Iraqi Army but was again turned away, this time because he was short-sighted.
A former wife, Saja, also agreed to speak at length for the first time for the documentary, which was shown on French television last week.
Married to the extremist for only three months when he was a Muslim cleric in Baghdad, she insists she never loved him.
 |
| Barcroft Images (Photo: Abaca/Sofia Amara/Barcroft Images) |
She reveals he would come home from his work at university, have dinner alone and take care of his cat.
One of his many purported children is Hagar, Saja’s daughter. The nine-year-old and her mum are in hiding from IS following threats to their lives.
Little Hagar, who plays with a water pistol in the film, only knows her father as a “bad man”, but not his true identity.
Her mother claims: “She is punished because she is the daughter of the most wanted criminal in the world.”
 |
| Daughter Hagar with a water pistol (Photo: Nova / Abaca / Barcroft Images) |
Chilling footage shows ISIS terrorist using child as a human shield to walk through streets in Mosul
Those who knew al-Baghdadi as an intense Muslim scholar at university cannot believe his rise to power.
Although he held a pathological hatred of the West from an early age, few thought he would go on to create the biggest terror threat the world has ever seen.
The experience of being imprisoned by US forces after the invasion of Iraq seems to have been a formative factor.
One fellow inmate, who knew him at the grim desert prison Camp Bucca, said: “He has undergone a radical transformation. I would never have thought he would become the person he is now.”
Today, al-Baghdadi is believed to preparing to make his last stand.
He has perhaps already slipped across into Syria to Raqqa, the de-facto IS capital, to escape advancing Iraqi troops.
The myth of the quiet boy who became the most feared terrorist in the world continues to grow.
ISIS killings since he fled capture
March 2015: Bardo Museum shooting in Tunisia, 22 dead.
June 2015: Shooting in Tunisian resort of Sousse, 38 dead, mostly British.
October 2015: Russian tourist jet from Sharm el-Sheikh bombed, 224 dead.
November 2015: Paris shootings, including at Bataclan, 130 dead.
December 2015: Shooting at a hotel in San Bernardino, California, 14 dead.
March 2016: Brussels bombs, 32 dead.
June 2016: Shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, 49 dead.
July 2016: Terrorist drives a large truck into crowds attending Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France, 86 dead.
December 2016: Hijacked truck driven into crowds at a Berlin market, 12 dead.
Mirror.co.uk
