How a talented footballer became world’s most wanted man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, one of the world’s most wanted jihadist leaders, was once simply considered his mosque's best football player

A street in Baghdad's Tobchi neighbourhood

The only time the polite, bespectacled student shone was on the football field, playing for the team from the local mosque.

“He was the Messi of our team,” said Abu Ali, a fellow player and worshipper at the mosque, making comparison with the Lionel Messi, the Argentinian striker. “He was our best player.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the impressive striker, is now the world’s most wanted jihadist leader.

In interviews with the Telegraph, contemporaries of Baghdadi trace how he went from being a shy, unimpressive, religious scholar and man who eschewed violence, to an infamously dangerous extremist, self-appointed caliph and reputed heir to Osama bin Laden.

Born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri to a family of preachers, the now-leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant lived his childhood in the Sunni heartland town of Samarra north of Baghdad.

But it is in the Iraqi capital that he spent his formative years, studying for his undergraduate and Masters degrees, and eventually his PhD at the Islamic University.

There, for more than a decade, until 2004, he lived in a room attached to a small local mosque in Tobchi, a poor and ramshackle neighbourhood on the western fringes of Baghdad, inhabited by both Shia and Sunni Muslim residents.

Perhaps it is because of its misfortune of being implicated in the legacy of Baghdadi that nowadays Tobchi is so tense.

A street in Baghdad's Tobchi neighbourhood

A street in Baghdad's Tobchi neighbourhood (Sam Tarling)

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered the capture of anyone even remotely associated with Baghdadi – just mentioning the name of the jihadist leader is enough to invite arrest or worse.

Tobchi’s streets are cut off from the rest of Baghdad by improvised rubble barricades. Its narrow alleyways are stern with rubbish and abandoned furniture.

Residents remain inside their homes, as Shia militiamen prowl for sympathisers of the Islamic State, whose front line with Baghdad is now just a few miles away.

Sitting in his living room with the curtains drawn, as his brother kept a careful watch outside, Abu Ali, who knew Baghdadi, told the Telegraph: “When Ibrahim al-Badri arrived in Tobchi he was 18 years old. He was a quiet person, and very polite.”

“He wasn’t a preacher as people say,” he added, referring to a profile recently published by Isil that heralds Baghdadi as a grand imam. “The mosque here had its own imam. When he was away, religious students would take his place. [Baghdadi] would sometimes lead the prayers but not give any sermons.”

Abu Ali did though concede that: “He had a nice voice, which was just right for the prayers.”

He came to know Baghdadi through group activities put on by the mosque clergy: “We’d play football. In Saddam’s time we’d all travel to places outside Baghdad, such as Anbar district, for picnics, or we’d go swimming.”

The Iraqi University, in the Adhamiya neighbourhood of Baghdad

The Iraqi University, in the Adhamiya neighbourhood of Baghdad (Sam Tarling)

Abu Ali, a man well over six feet high, described the young man’s appearance: “He was a little shorter than me. He had a medium length beard.”

He said that he had seen the mug shot, posted online by the United States government with a reward of $10 million for his capture: “I recognised him in the picture. Except that when I knew him he wore glasses. He was very short sighted.”

The jihadist-to-be had been a “conservative Salafi” practitioner of Islam, his former neighbour said: “I remember one incident where there was a wedding in the area and men and women were dancing in the same room. He was walking past on the street and saw this. He shouted ‘How can men and women be dancing together like this? It’s irreligious.’ He stopped the dance.”

When Baghdadi completed his PhD, which was focused on the study of sharia law, at the start of this millennium, he married and, less than a year later, his wife gave birth to their first child. His son is now approximately 11 years old.

As the war drums rumbled against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and when the allies invaded in 2003, Baghdadi continued to live the life of a family man.

“He didn’t show any hostility to the Americans,” said Abu Ali. “He wasn’t like the hot blooded ones. He must have been a quiet planner.”

Perhaps the catalyst that propelled Baghdadi to jihad was a local affair: in 2004 he had a disagreement with the owner of the local mosque, who was also his landlord, and who banished him from his home and, eventually, from Tobchi, residents said.

“The mosque owner wanted Baghdadi to join the Islamic Party, a political group he was part of,” said Abu Ali.

Possibly because in the Salafist doctrine political parties are sacrilegious -seen as challenging the rule of God – Baghdadi refused. The disagreement turned into a shouting match, and “then they scuffled”.

“Now the mosque owner lives abroad. He is afraid to return to Iraq in case Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi will seek his revenge,” added Abu Ali.

The description of Baghdadi given to the Telegraph by another of his contemporaries, Ahmed al-Dabash, the leader of the Islamic Army of Iraq who fought against the allied invasion in 2003 matched that of the Tobchi resident.

“I was with Baghdadi at the Islamic University. We studied the same course, but he wasn’t a friend. He was quiet, and retiring. He spent time alone,” said Mr Dabash.

Later, when he helped found the Islamic Army, Mr Dabash fought alongside militia leaders who were committing some of the worst excesses in violence and would later form al-Qaeda, but, he said, Baghdadi was not one of them.

“I used to know all the leaders [of the insurgency] personally. Zarqawi [the former leader of al-Qaeda] was closer than a brother to me,” he said.

“But I didn’t know Baghdadi. He was insignificant. He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”

Barricades block a street in Baghdad's Tobchi neighbourhood

Barricades block a street in Baghdad's Tobchi neighbourhood (Sam Tarling)

Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi security strategist who has met Baghdadi in person said he believed that it was a subsequent prison stint in an American jail which cemented Baghdadi as the jihadist he is today.

Baghdadi was thrown into the sprawling American run Camp Bucca in late 2005, after US intelligence reports record claimed that he was fighting against the US occupation.

But even whilst under their lock and key, Baghdadi cut such an innocuous figure that he slipped through the US’ net. Failing to identify him as particularly dangerous individual, guards released him when the prison shut down in 2009.

“He was a bad dude but he wasn’t the worst of the worst,” Colonel Kenneth King, then Camp Bucca’s commanding officer, told the Daily Beast.

His parting comment, “I’ll see you guys in New York”, was not seen as a threat by the guards.

Inside the prison Baghdadi is believed to have met with and been radicalised by jihadists from al-Qaeda, the group holding a reign of terror after the Iraqi invasion, with daily suicide bombings in towns and cities.

When released he reaffirmed his membership to al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group which, even after its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by a US air strike in 2006, was known for its extreme violence.

Its members would routinely behead victims with rusty knives, strap suicide bombs on the mentally disabled to then be remotely detonated when the person walked into a crowd, and hide explosives in corpses to kill funeral-goers.

A year later, in 2010, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, Zarqawi’s successor, also died in a US air strike.

In a dramatic ascent, the quiet scholar suddenly emerged as the man elected to lead al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq.

“It’s still a mystery why they chose specifically Baghdadi to lead. There were many others who had been in the organisation before him,” said Mr Hashimi. “He was elected by a Shura council [a religious consultative assembly], in Iraq’s northern province of Ninevah. And there, nine of the 11 people voted in favour of Baghdadi.”

As the war unfolded in neighbouring Syria in 2012, Baghdadi began to dispatch some of his men across the border.

The Islamic State of Iraq began to rival Jabhat Al-Nusra, the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate in size and power.

Joined by thousands of foreign fighters, including from Britain, Baghdadi and his men wrested control of the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.

In early 2014 the group broke away from al-Qaeda, when Baghdadi ignored Ayman al-Zawaheri's calls for ISI to leave Syria to Jabhat Al-Nusra. Instead, Baghdadi renamed his group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and pressed his offensive in Syria harder, capturing most of the country’s oil fields in northern Syria.

Then, having established networks in Syria, and earning several million dollars every day from the revenue of the oilfields in his grasp Baghdadi made his most ambitious move.

In June some of his fighters stormed across the border back to Iraq, seizing Mosul, the country's second city and moving steadily towards Baghdad.

A slick propaganda wing has helped the advance, with Baghdadi’s allies on Twitter and other social media sites circulating gruesome images of the overtly sectarian massacres the group was committing – causing tens of thousands to flee their homes even before the jihadists arrived.

Then, in July, Baghdadi appeared publicly for the first time in years sporting a long beard, black robes and a watch geared to Muslims that beeps with a reminder when it is time to pray.

Standing on a parapet in Mosul's central Mosque, the geeky former student announced that the lands his group had conquered were no longer part of Iraq or Syria, but formed an "Islamic State" of which he was the "caliph" or leader.

The United States and a coalition of countries are now working to make true President Barack Obama's promise to "degrade" and "ultimately destroy" Isil.

A series of air strikes in Iraq and Syria are aimed at destroying the group’s weapons caches and bases and target its leadership.

Up to now, hampered by a lack of good intelligence, its air attacks have been opportunistic, or in support of ground operations by Iraqi or Kurdish troops.

At the weekend, the US hit “leadership” targets at least twice – a convoy near Mosul on Friday and a meeting at the town of Al-Qaim on Saturday – among 18 strikes on Iraq.

A Pentagon spokesman said it was still unclear whether, as reported, Isil’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been wounded, but his adviser, Abu Suja, was killed.

Unlike his al-Qaeda predecessors, Baghdadi is known to have decentralised the power structure of Isil so that the death of one man, even himself, would not likely bring about the organisation's collapse.

He has created a "council" of leaders, with each individual on the council assigned to specific roles such as the management of finance, military or propaganda.

He is known to be more calculating than his predecessors, reportedly aborting missions if he feels they are too dangerous for his men.

But equally he has created a group of unending ambition: the leader has issued statements demanding, first the toppling of Baghdad, and then the inclusion of the Gulf and Jordan in is caliphate.

In fact, he boasted in his recorded speech, his men would not stop conquering ground until they reached “Rome”.

In the space of three years however the former football enthusiast has helped transform his group that was a fringe movement to be best equipped, best funded militia of modern times.

Even if he has been killed, the man known for his calculating silence has created an organisation that is likely to be the West's enemy for years to come.