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On Sunday morning, October 27, 2019, President Donald Trump announced the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Idlib, Syria. Al-Baghdadi was tracked down by Delta Force and Army Rangers with army bomb sniffing dogs, and ran into an unfinished tunnel that culminated in a dead end. He ended his life – and that of three children whom he took with him – by detonating a suicide vest. In the end, this ruthless and brutal man, who was the spiritual and operational leader of ISIS, died a coward and a murderer. He expected to be greeted by a host of beautiful virgins in paradise. I wonder how he felt when he found himself at the gates of hell where he faces eternal damnation! – Ilana Freedman
The Rise and Fall of ISIS
For thousands of years, the Middle East has been a cauldron of political, social, and religious unrest. Countless armies have marched across the barren deserts, clashing with each other for supremacy, and spilling the blood of innocents from time immemorial. The death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spells the end of one of the most ruthless and bloodthirsty leaders in the ages-long fight for global domination. 
The rise of ISIS presented a challenge not seen since the early 20th century, but very much the norm during the hundreds of years following the 7th century establishment of Islam. 
Since its inception, ISIS has been the pure embodiment of Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture as exemplified by the life of Muhammad. It conquered and acquired territories, terrorized the populations it conquered, stole the wealth from their farms and factories, sold the non-Muslims it conquered into sexual slavery, or murdered them on the spot. They destroyed churches and ancient landmarks in order to erase any symbols of non-Islamic society, stripped the regions it controlled of their wealth, and left the people who remained, without hope.
ISIS grew out of an al-Qa’eda franchise in Iraq (AQI), and became a menace that rivaled in savagery and barbarity anything the world has seen since the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. In the absence of effective leadership to stop it, ISIS grew increasingly powerful, and while the world yawned and went back to sleep, the growing slaughter of innocents turned into genocide. 
ISIS was a phenomenon of the twenty-first century that tried to mirror the original Caliphates, dating back to the earliest days of Islam itself. Taking advantage of the vacuum created by the weak policies of the West and the unwillingness of Western leaders to engage against it, ISIS moved into Syria, where it joined the fight against the Asaad government, then swept back into Iraq and thrived. ISIS fighters cut a swath of wanton destruction, suffering, and death, leaving behind them a trail of misery and despair as they surged across the Middle East and North Africa. 
ISIS evolved over a period of years from a small group of al-Qa’eda-sponsored terrorists, led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His group was sanctioned by bin Laden himself, but al-Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike on his safe house in Iraq in 2006. 
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi assumed leadership in 2010. While ISIS’ original aim had been to establish an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, the Syrian civil war opened the door for expansion from Iraq into Syria. ISIS used this opening to expand its operations and consolidate its power. As the number of terrorist groups proliferated throughout Syria, it was an opportunity the growing terrorist group could not resist. 
The media began disseminating photographs of women and children viciously raped, tortured, and murdered, and large groups of men, systematically beheaded, crucified, or shot en masse with their bodies left lying where they had fallen into mass graves. Although Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was blamed for many of these, it was the trade mark of ISIS that began to emerge. They started their operations in Syria quietly, using the fighting of other groups as camouflage. But over time, they emerged as one of the strongest and most brutal of the terrorists groups.  
Crimes of extreme barbarism and mass murders, attributed to al-Assad, were clearly the work of ISIS terrorists, who particularly targeted Christians, Alawites, Shia Muslims, and other minorities. Women and children were viciously tortured, raped, and murdered and men were systematically shot, beheaded, or crucified. Even the August 2013 gas attack on Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, where hundreds of people were reported to have died, and has long been firmly attributed to al-Assad, showed all the signs of having been carried out by the al Qa’eda rebels (i.e. ISIS), according to a U.N. report. 
As the group became increasingly involved in the Syrian war, its mission expanded to taking control of the Sunni-majority areas in northern Syria, rather than just operating there. 
The Rise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi  
Little was known about the shadowy figure of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (a nom de guerre), who is also known as Abu Du’a and the “Invisible Sheikh” but whose real name is Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarri. U.S. State Department records list al-Baghdadi as born in Fallujah, Iraq in 1971. Other reports put his birth in the Iraqi city of Samarra, which is more likely because of his surname which, according to Middle East custom, indicates the city of his birth. Al-Baghdadi was a highly-educated scholar of Islam, who held a PhD in Islamic jurisprudence, and wore the black turban to signify direct descent from Muhammad.  
In February 2004, al-Baghdadi was arrested by U.S. forces near Fallujah, and was interned in Camp Bucca near the city of Basra in southern Iraq. He was released in December of that year as a “low level prisoner”, according to State Department documents, a mistake of colossal proportions as future events would make abundantly clear.   
Al-Baghdadi’s time at Camp Bucca was well-spent. The Americans considered him to be ‘safe’ and he was able to roam freely around the camp, visiting with other prisoners, and developing his network. The other prisoners trusted him, and, in the end, many of the alumni of Camp Bucca played important roles in the leadership positions of ISIS.  
It took until October 2011 before the State Department recognized its mistake and posted “a reward offer of up to $10 million for information leading to the location, arrest, and conviction of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).” He was named a Designated Global Terrorist under the terms of Executive Order 13224. He was also listed as a terrorist by the United Nations Security Council al-Qaida Sanctions Committee. But by then al-Baghdadi had gone underground and was well on his way to building his power base.
Within ISIS, al-Baghdadi was respected as a battlefield commander and tactician,  but to the outside world, his rigid enforcement of Islamic Law made him a monster of gigantic proportions, one who needed to be stopped. He remained elusive, however, and even his whereabouts after assuming power as Caliph were a matter for speculation. 
Al-Baghdadi separated ISIS from al Qaeda in June 2014. ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani (who was later killed in a U.S. airstrike) announced, in a video that was distributed on-line, “The Shura [council] of the Islamic State met and discussed [the caliphate] . . . . The Islamic State decided to establish an Islamic caliphate and to designate a caliph for the state of the Muslims . . . . The jihadist cleric Baghdadi was designated the caliph of the Muslims. . . . The leader of Muslims everywhere.” He said it would be called ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah, or “Islamic State”.
Adnani urged Muslims to “shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace” and “reject democracy and other garbage from the West”. Adnani called on al-Qa’eda and Muslims around the world to pledge their allegiance to the new, self-proclaimed Caliph and to the new Caliphate. It was the beginning of a period of rapid growth and power for the terrorist group.
Al-Baghdadi officially established his operational center in the city of Raqqa, the sixth largest city in Syria. Within months, ISIS opened a second front in Iraq, and their fighters smashed their way southward through city after city, capturing a huge area in the largely Sunni parts of northern Iraq. 
One of the most dramatic events, which caught the attention of the world, was its capture of the Iraqi city of Mosul. Up until then, ISIS had suffered from a severe shortage of weapons as they faced the U.S.-equipped Iraqi military forces, but on June 10, 2014, the day they launched their assault on Mosul, the situation changed dramatically. 

The Iraqi military had 30,000 soldiers stationed in Mosul. Yet when 1,000 ISIS fighters came into the city, they fled, leaving their weapons behind and their armories unsecured. ISIS overran the city. They sacked the Central Bank and made off with $42 million worth of gold bullion and cash. 

This made ISIS the richest terrorist group in the world. The small ISIS army also helped themselves to huge stores of U.S. weaponry and vehicles, including a fleet of 2,300 Humvees valued at $1 billion, 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns, and 52 M198 Howitzer mobile gun systems, that had been left behind for the Iraqi military by departing U.S. troops. 
By June 29, when al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate, the capture of Mosul had changed everything.
ISIS continued its conquest south into Iraq in columns of stolen Humvees that were also seen on the roads in places like Aleppo, Syria, 250 miles away, filled with well-armed ISIS fighters. Although they were a prime target for an American air strike, the long columns were left to proceed unimpeded. Many consider this the single, most egregious error that the Obama administration made in the early days of ISIS’ conquest – that they could have stopped ISIS in its tracks and didn’t. As a result, ISIS was able to take over large portions of Iraq and Syria, leaving a trail of theft, extortion, destruction, and genocide in its wake. 

The terrorist group that President Barrack Obama had dismissed as “the JV (Junior Varsity) team” had quickly become the fastest growing and wealthiest terrorist organization in the world. 

Brutality in the Name of Islam
In August 2014, al-Baghdadi’s army launched an attack against the Yazidi city of Sinjar, in northern Iraq. As many as 5,000 Yazidis were murdered, and another 50,000 fled. Thousands of Yazidi women and even little girls were captured for the sex slave market. An article in ISIS’ slick English magazine “Dabiq” explained it this way:
“After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharī’a amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority …. one should remember that enslaving the families of the kuffār [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharī’ah…”
Another especially brutal chapter under al-Baghdadi’s rule of destruction played out in Palmyra, Iraq. Prior to the arrival of ISIS into Palmyra, the 81-year-old curator of the city’s treasures, Khaled al-Asaad, who was considered “one of the most important pioneers in Syrian archaeology in the 20th Century”, raced to hide as many of the ancient artifacts as possible. 
Asaad had spent over 50 years working at the UNESCO World Heritage site, and had written many books and scientific texts on the archeological treasures in Palmyra. When ISIS took over the city, al-Asaad was captured and tortured for more than a month in order to force him to reveal where the treasures had been hidden. In August 2015, Asaad was beheaded and his body was hanged from a column in the town’s main square.
Under the rule of al-Baghdadi, ISIS fighters justified all of their barbaric practices with reference to Shariah, or Islamic law. Al-Bagdhadi himself took captured women as sex slaves, including an American Kayla Mueller, a U.S. Aid worker who was captured in northern Syria in August 2013. She became the sex slave of al-Baghdadi, who raped her repeatedly, until she died in a Jordanian air strike in February 2015. 
Al-Baghdadi’s victims, at the hands of his ‘soldiers’, also included Americans James Foley, Stephen Sotloff, and Peter Kassig. And tens of thousands of other innocent victims whom he considered infidels or who did not meet his fanatical standards of Sharia. 
Al-Bagdadhi is Caught and Killed by U.S. Special Forces
But this week, al-Baghdadi met a just, if ignominious, end. It was reported that he ran, whimpering and crying, into the tunnel, followed by U.S. Delta Forces and Army Rangers with bomb sniffing dogs, and that when he reached the dead end, he detonated his suicide vest and killed not only himself, but the three small children he had brought with him. 
Al-Baghdadi lived his life terrorizing and murdering innocents under his self-assigned power, but he died a coward, humiliated, and in pieces. 
Epilog:  While Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead and gone, ISIS is still around and active. What will happen without his leadership is unknown. He ran his organization with a firm hand and a watchful eye. But will someone else take his place? When one is a caliph appointed by Allah, who is there to replace him? And what will be his mandate? The future remains a mystery, but the death of this evil man, who claimed to be a descendent of Mohammed, is a gift to mankind. And one for which we all can be thankful.  AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed
Portions of this article were taken from the book “JIHAD! The Threat of the Islamic State to America” by Ilana Freedman. This book is available on the AmericaOutLoud.com bookstore. 

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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