Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: Execution Videos by ISIS Are Now Banned

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has banned any more execution videos by the Islamic State, but the orders reportedly have created a division with the organization's ranks.

ARA News reported that, according to sources, al-Baghdadi was responding to the feelings of Muslims who regarded the videos as "disgusting and scary to children."

The video ban has upset some within ISIS who see the execution videos as an extension of terrorism activities.

"Some of IS militants supported Baghdadi's decision, taking into consideration criticism of the public that describes scenes of beheadings as barbaric," wrote ARA News' Jan Nasro. "While other militants rejected the decision saying that such scenes are meant to intimidate their enemies, represented by western powers, and not the common folk."

According to the website Middle East Eye.net, a number of Arabic-language news agencies said on Friday that Baghdadi explained his decision in a statement delivered to media offices in Syria and Iraq.

The website said Baghdadi ordered that his followers don't include scenes of the actual executions in their videos and limit them to moments before or after the act.

ISIS execution videos often show men in orange jumpsuits kneeling, heads bowed, with a black-clad masked gunman behind each one, with the ISIS flag in the background, noted Middle East Eye.net.

Past videos of executions of hostages – which have included non-combatants such as journalists and aid workers – had sparked anger not only in the United States, but in other parts of the Middle East.

In February, an ISIS video showing a Jordan pilot being burned alive, sparked Jordanians to call for acts of revenge against the organization, according to CBS News.

"(The video ban) won't eliminate the IS-led horrors that have been seen by people around the world over the past couple of years," Ferid Hisso, a Syrian politician and lawyer, told ARA News. "Instead of banning the release of such videos, Baghdadi should have rather banned the crimes behind the scenes. But he has already justified the barbarism of his followers, and his decision makes no sense."[source]

Fall of Ramadi to ISIS Weakens Rule of Iraqi Premier

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq in Washington last month. Mr. Abadi is facing challenges from Shiites tied to Iran. Credit James Lawler Duggan/Reuters 

BAGHDAD — As Shiite militiamen began streaming toward Ramadi on Monday to try to reverse the loss of the city to the Islamic State, the defeat has given new momentum to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s rivals within his own Shiite political bloc.

At the urging of American officials who sought to sideline the militias, Mr. Abadi had, in effect, gambled that the combination of United States airstrikes and local Sunni tribal fighters would be able to drive Islamic State fighters out of the city as fighting intensified in recent weeks. The hope was that a victory in Ramadi could also serve as a push for a broader offensive to retake the Sunni heartland of Anbar Province.

But as the setback brought the Shiite militias, and their Iranian backers, back into the picture in Anbar, intensified Shiite infighting appeared to leave the prime minister more vulnerable than ever. And it presented a new example of how developments on the Iraqi battlefield have sometimes instantly shifted political currents in the country.

“Abadi does not have a strong challenge from Iraq’s Sunnis or Iraqi Kurds,” said Ahmed Ali, an Iraqi analyst in Washington with the Education for Peace in Iraq Center. “It’s from the Shia side.”

Mr. Abadi’s rivals within Iraq’s Shiite political bloc have been accusing him for months of doing too much to work with Sunnis rather than empowering the militias and fellow Shiites.

He became prime minister last year with strong backing from the United States on the belief that he would be a more inclusive leader than his predecessor, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and would reach out to the country’s minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds. Mr. Abadi has done so, by pushing for the arming of local Sunni tribesmen and reaching a deal with the Kurds to share oil revenue.

But at every turn he has been thwarted by powerful Shiite leaders with links to Iran, including Mr. Maliki. Now, the latest setback in Ramadi has given Mr. Abadi’s rivals even more ammunition.

Some Shiite politicians, including Mr. Maliki, and powerful militia leaders linked to Iran, whose fighters are now preparing to fight in Anbar, have become increasingly critical of Mr. Abadi. Either they have spoken out themselves or news media outlets they control have taken aim at the prime minister through distorted coverage that has highlighted security failures in Anbar.

In one instance, the television news channel Afaq, which is run by allies of Mr. Maliki, gave running coverage to the supposed slaughter of 140 army soldiers last month at an outpost in Anbar, spurring public criticism of Mr. Abadi. Western diplomats and military officials say the story was untrue, and the Islamic State, notably, never claimed to have killed that many.

The effect, though, was to undermine Mr. Abadi’s rule, analysts said. There were calls for Mr. Abadi to resign.

Flashing uncharacteristic anger, Mr. Abadi appeared in front of Parliament and essentially dared his rivals to remove him from power.

“Iran is using Maliki against Abadi,” said a diplomat in Baghdad with close ties to the Iranians who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain relationships in the capital. “They don’t want Abadi to become pro-Western. The Iranians want Abadi weak.”

An official close to Mr. Abadi, who spoke anonymously to discuss private conversations, related a joke that has been told among the prime minister’s inner circle: “Even if two fish fight in the river, it is Maliki stirring them up.”

The official added, of Mr. Abadi, “He is obsessed with Maliki.”

The largely Shiite militias are grouped under an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces and, on paper at least, are under Mr. Abadi’s command.

Some of the newer units, formed last year after Shiite clerics called on young men to take up arms and fight the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, do answer to the prime minister. Some of the most powerful groups, though, such as the Badr Organization, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah, may answer to Mr. Abadi in individual cases — they did not advance on Anbar until the prime minister gave orders, for example. But those militias were trained and supported directly by Iran, and the militias’ leaders have grown immensely in popularity with the Iraqi public as they have won significant battles against the Islamic State.

This has presented serious challenges to Mr. Abadi’s authority. For instance, in March, at the beginning of an operation to retake the city of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, the plans were drawn up by militia leaders, and then Mr. Abadi was told it would happen. Once those fighters failed to retake Tikrit decisively, Mr. Abadi asked them to withdraw and called for help from American airstrikes, reasserting his authority for the moment.

Now that the militias have been called upon to fight in Anbar, Mr. Abadi’s authority seems to be waning again, and the militias’ cachet has only grown. One of the most popular pictures circulating on social media in Iraq on Monday showed Hadi al-Ameri, the powerful head of the Badr militia, examining a map and seemingly plotting out a new campaign in Anbar.

Fanar Haddad, an Iraqi analyst, recently wrote in an online column that the militias have “provided a potent rallying point for a reinvigorated sense of Iraqi nationalism, albeit one with distinctly Shiite overtones.”

In an interview, Mr. Haddad said Mr. Abadi was limited in his ability to constrain the Popular Mobilization Forces — or Hashid in Arabic, as the militias are known here. “If you want to be part of Iraq’s evolving political game, you can’t go against the Hashid,” he said. “It’s just too popular.”

The militias’ growing popularity has coincided with an even more powerful approval of Iran’s role in Iraq, at least among Shiite Iraqis.

Once, even many Iraqi Shiites looked at Iran with some suspicion, partly because of the legacy of the long and bloody war that Iraq fought with Iran in the 1980s. A frequent gripe of the past was about low-quality Iranian goods, such as cheese and yogurt, clogging the shelves of grocery stories.

Now, though, in the words of Ali Kareem Salman, a 31-year-old government worker in the south, “Shiites think that Iran is the protector of the Shiite sect.”

Hanan Fatlawi, a Shiite lawmaker who is one of Mr. Abadi’s most vocal critics, said: “Previously, you could divide the Shia into two sides: those who hate Iran and those who love them. But after the entrance of ISIS, and with the situation we are in, many people are grateful to Iran. Their opinion changed.”

Of the militias, she said, “Without them, there would be no Baghdad.”

There is an essential paradox to Mr. Abadi’s leadership thus far. In nearly every way he has proved to be the inclusive leader mandated by the United States, reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds and seeking consensus. But within Iraq, he is increasingly viewed as weak and unable to effectively shift Iraq’s tragic trajectory.

“This term ‘inclusive personality,’ I only hear from foreigners,” Ms. Fatlawi said. “He was weak from the start.”[source]

Ramadi, Anbar Province Capital And Key Iraqi City Falls to ISIS as Last of Security Forces Flee

Iraqi security forces withdrawing from Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, on Sunday. As the city fell to the Islamic State, militants from the group carried out executions of people loyal to the government. Credit Associated Press

BAGHDAD — The last Iraqi security forces fled Ramadi on Sunday, as the city fell completely to the militants of the Islamic State, who ransacked the provincial military headquarters, seizing a large store of weapons, and killed people loyal to the government, according to security officials and tribal leaders.

The fall of Ramadi, despite intensified American airstrikes in recent weeks in a bid to save the city, represented the biggest victory so far this year for the Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the vast areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls. The defeat also laid bare the failed strategy of the Iraqi government, which had announced last month a new offensive to retake Anbar Province, a large desert region in the west of which Ramadi is the capital.

“The city has fallen,” said Muhannad Haimour, the spokesman for Anbar’s governor. Mr. Haimour said that at least 500 civilians and security personnel had been killed over the last two days in and around Ramadi, either from fighting or executions. Among the dead, he said, was the 3-year-old daughter of a soldier.

 

“Men, women, kids and fighters’ bodies are scattered on the ground,” said Sheikh Rafi al-Fahdawi, a tribal leader from Ramadi, who was in Baghdad on Sunday and whose men had been resisting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

He also said, “All security forces and tribal leaders have either retreated or been killed in battle. It is a big loss.”

Ramadi fell a day after the Pentagon said Special Operations forces, flying in helicopters that took off from Iraq, carried out a raid in eastern Syria that resulted in the death of an Islamic State leader and the capture of his wife, along with the recovery of a trove of materials American officials hope will yield important intelligence on the group.

American officials said recently that the Islamic State was on the defensive in Iraq, noting that the group had lost territory in Salahuddin Province and in some other areas in northern Iraq near the border with the autonomous Kurdish region. Yet the fall of Ramadi shows that the group is still capable of carrying out effective offensive operations.

Anbar Province holds painful historical import for the United States as the place where nearly 1,300 Marines and soldiers died after the American-led invasion of 2003. Since the beginning of 2014, months before the fall of Mosul and the start of the American air campaign against the Islamic State, the United States has been working with the Iraqi government to drive the extremist group from Anbar, sending vast supplies of weapons and ammunition and, more recently, training Sunni tribal fighters at an air base in the province.

With defeat looming in Ramadi on Sunday afternoon, the Anbar Provincial Council met in Baghdad and voted to ask Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to send Shiite fighters to rescue Anbar, a largely Sunni province. In response, Mr. Abadi issued a statement calling for the militias, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces and including several powerful Shiite forces supported by Iran, to be ready to fight. Some of the Shiite irregular units, which were formed last summer after Shiite clerics put out a call to arms, are more firmly under the command of the government, while others answer to Iran.

The involvement of the militias in Anbar had been opposed by the United States, which leads an international coalition that has been carrying out airstrikes in support of Iraqi forces. American officials had worried that the militias could inflame sectarian tensions in the province and ultimately make it harder to pacify.

As they considered asking for the militias’ assistance, Anbar officials met over the weekend with the American ambassador to Iraq, Stuart E. Jones, to ascertain the United States’ position on the issue. According to officials, Mr. Jones told the Anbar delegation that the United States would continue its air campaign, provided that the militias were under the command of Mr. Abadi, and not Iranian advisers, and that the militias were properly organized to avoid American bombing runs.

At the outset of an offensive to liberate Tikrit, in Salahuddin Province, in March, the Iranian-backed militias took the lead, and American warplanes stayed away. Once those militias stalled, Mr. Abadi ordered them to retreat, which was followed by airstrikes by the United States, an advance by Iraqi security forces, and the liberation of Tikrit.

In the wake of that victory, Mr. Abadi promised a new effort in Anbar, a campaign to be led by the Iraqi security forces and supported by American airstrikes, with Iranian-backed militias on the sidelines. A crucial component of that strategy was to arm local Sunni tribesmen to fight, but that plan never materialized on a large-scale, partly because of resistance by powerful Shiite political leaders in Baghdad.

The deterioration of Anbar over the past month underscored the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi Army, which is being trained by American military advisers, and raised questions about the United States’ strategy to defeat the Islamic State. At the same time, now that the militias are being called upon, the collapse of Ramadi has demonstrated again the influence of Iran, even if its advisers are unlikely to be on the ground in Anbar, as they were during the operation in Tikrit.

The Islamic State, which has held areas around Ramadi for nearly a year and a half, began an offensive on the city late Thursday night, and on Friday afternoon captured the provincial government headquarters.

Mr. Abadi on Friday promised to send reinforcements, but only about 200 soldiers arrived from Baghdad to help resist in one of the last contested neighborhoods in the city, according to a security official in Anbar.

American officials in Washington played down the situation Friday, saying it was similar to the up-and-down fighting there since the beginning of last year.

Yet the Islamic State was able to consolidate its hold of the city over the weekend, and on Sunday seized one of the last government redoubts, the local operations command center. The remaining officers and soldiers had fled, and one of them reached by telephone Sunday afternoon said they were stuck in a convoy southwest of Ramadi, with Islamic State militants closing in from four sides.

Another soldier who had been stationed at the Anbar Operations Command headquarters said the forces had left behind a huge cache of weapons recently sent by Baghdad, including rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns. The weapons had been supplied by both the United States and Russia.

“ISIS is gaining more weapons, and the battle will be harder in the future,” said the soldier, who declined to give his name because he feared for his life.

Shiite militia leaders, who had mostly watched the collapse from afar, were scrambling on Sunday to mobilize their men.

Mueen al-Kadhumi, a leader in the Popular Mobilization Forces and a member of the Badr Organization, a longstanding militia with ties to Iran, said, “We have recalled all off-duty fighters to join their units as soon as possible to participate in the upcoming battle for Anbar.”

Pentagon officials said Sunday that it was premature to declare that Ramadi had fallen.

“We’re continuing to monitor reports of tough fighting in Ramadi, and the situation remains fluid and contested,” said Col. Steven H. Warren, a Defense Department spokesman.

Coalition warplanes carried out more attacks on Islamic State targets in Iraq, with seven airstrikes on militant positions in or near Ramadi over the weekend, according to official statements. But the advance by Islamic State fighters was evidence again that American air power alone could not hold territory for the Baghdad government, or dislodge the militants, without an effective Iraqi force on the ground.

The wife of the Islamic State’s senior financial officer remained in American custody in Iraq on Sunday. Umm Sayyaf was captured during the Saturday raid into Syria that killed her husband, Abu Sayyaf, and about a dozen militant fighters.

A senior American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation, said Abu Sayyaf’s death was likely to cause only a minor disruption in the Islamic State’s financial operations, including black-market sales of oil petroleum products.

“This will be short-lived,” the official said. “Organizations like this are designed to have succession plans.”[source]

U.S. Caution in Strikes Gives ISIS an Edge, Many Iraqis Say

Islamic State fighters paraded along the streets of Raqqa, Syria, in 2014. Credit Reuters

WASHINGTON — American intelligence analysts have identified seven buildings in downtown Raqqa in eastern Syria as the main headquarters of the Islamic State. But the buildings have gone untouched during the 10-month allied air campaign.

And just last week, convoys of heavily armed Islamic State fighters paraded triumphantly through the streets of the provincial capital Ramadi in western Iraq after forcing Iraqi troops to flee. They rolled on unscathed by coalition fighter-bombers.

American and allied warplanes are equipped with the most precise aerial arsenal ever fielded. But American officials say they are not striking significant, and obvious, Islamic State targets out of fear that the attacks will accidentally kill civilians. Killing such innocents could hand the militants a major propaganda coup and alienate the local Sunni tribesmen, whose support is critical to ousting the militants, and Sunni Arab countries that are part of the fragile American-led coalition.

But many Iraqi commanders and some American officers say that exercising such prudence with airstrikes is a major reason the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh, has been able to seize vast territory in recent months in Iraq and Syria. That caution — coupled with President Obama’s reluctance to commit significant American firepower to a war the White House declared over in 2011, when the last United States combat troops withdrew from Iraq — has led to persistent complaints from Iraqi officials that the United States has been too cautious in its air campaign.

 

Iraqi officials say the limited American airstrikes have allowed columns of Islamic State fighters essentially free movement on the battlefield.

“The international alliance is not providing enough support compared with ISIS’ capabilities on the ground in Anbar,” said Maj. Muhammed al-Dulaimi, an Iraqi officer in Anbar Province, which contains Ramadi. “The U.S. airstrikes in Anbar didn’t enable our security forces to resist and confront the ISIS attacks,” he added. “We lost large territories in Anbar because of the inefficiency of the U.S.-led coalition airstrikes.”

Much of the American caution comes from experience. Civilian deaths from American airstrikes during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were sometimes unacknowledged or understated by the military and caused a great deal of anger, which is a reason for the United States’ current skittishness and what commanders say is their overriding goal to prevent those deaths now.

The military’s Central Command on Thursday announced the results of an inquiry into the deaths of two children in Syria in November, saying they were probably killed by an American airstrike. It was the first time the Pentagon had acknowledged civilian casualties since it began the air campaign. A handful of other attacks are under investigation.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain that tracks the conflict through a network of contacts in Syria, more than 120 civilians have been killed by coalition strikes inside Syria.

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By far the largest episode was in the remote northeastern village of Bir Mahli, where more than 60 people, including numerous women and children, were reported killed this month in a series of strikes. Military officials acknowledged that the coalition had struck the village but said that those killed were Islamic State fighters.

Human rights advocates say that it remains unclear how many civilian lives the restrictions on airstrikes have saved.

“The U.S. has indeed put in place rigorous policies and procedures to minimize civilian harm, but with no combat troops on the ground, it is hard to evaluate how successful these policies have been,” said Federico Borello, the executive director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, an advocacy group.

Islamic State troops, however, appear to be taking advantage of the restrictions, as the militants increasingly fight from within civilian populations to deter attacks.

In Iraq, more than 80 percent of the allied airstrikes are supporting Iraqi troops in hotly contested areas like Ramadi and Baiji, the home of a major oil refinery. Many of the other strikes focus on so-called pop-up targets — small convoys of militants or heavy weaponry on the move. These have been a top priority of the campaign, even though only about one of every four air missions sent to attack the extremists have dropped bombs. The rest of the missions have returned to the base after failing to find a target they were permitted to hit under strict rules of engagement designed to avoid civilian casualties.

In Syria, the United States has a limited ability to gather intelligence to help generate targets, although the commando raid there this month that killed a financial leader of the Islamic State may signal a breakthrough. Many Islamic State training compounds, headquarters, storage facilities and other fixed sites were struck in the early days of the bombing, but the military’s deliberate process for approving other targets has frustrated several commanders.

“We have not taken the fight to these guys,” the pilot of an American A-10 attack plane said in a recent email. “We haven’t targeted their centers of gravity in Raqqa. All the roads between Syria and Iraq are still intact with trucks flowing freely.”

These critics describe an often cumbersome process to approve targets, and they say there are too few warplanes carrying out too few missions under too many restrictions.

“In most cases, unless a general officer can look at a video picture from a U.A.V., over a satellite link, I cannot get authority to engage,” the A-10 pilot said, referring to an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid punishment from his superiors.

To be sure, the air campaign has achieved several successes in conducting about 4,200 strikes that have dropped about 14,000 bombs and other weapons. The campaign has killed an estimated 12,500 fighters and helped Iraqi forces regain about 25 percent of the territory seized in Iraq by the Islamic State, according to American military figures.

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It has blunted the advance of Islamic State fighters in most areas by forcing them to disperse and conceal themselves. Allied warplanes have attacked oil refineries, weapons depots, command bunkers and communications centers in Syria as part of a plan to hamper the Islamic State’s ability to sustain its operations in Iraq and to disrupt communications among its senior leaders.

But American officials acknowledge that the Islamic State has remained resilient and adaptive. Fighters mingle with civilians more than ever. Islamic State commanders routinely change their methods of communication to avoid detection. Militants used a sandstorm, which made it more difficult for the Iraqis to identify targets, to seize an advantage in the recent Ramadi attack.

“We have always said this fight will be difficult, and there will be some setbacks,” Lt. Gen. John Hesterman III, the top allied air commander, said in a statement from his headquarters in Qatar. “Coalition air power has dramatically degraded Daesh’s ability to organize, project and sustain combat power while taking exceptional care to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties.”

The air campaign has averaged a combined total of about 15 strikes a day in Iraq and Syria. In contrast, the NATO air war against Libya in 2011 carried out about 50 strikes a day in its first two months. The campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 averaged 85 daily airstrikes, and the Iraq war in 2003 about 800 a day. American officials say targeting is more precise than in the past, so fewer flights are needed. A major constraint on the air campaign’s effectiveness, critics say, has been the White House’s refusal to authorize American troops to act as spotters on the battlefield, designating targets for allied bombing attacks.

Some members of Congress, including Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, have advocated this idea.

The absence of air controllers is a particular complication for battles in urban places like Ramadi, where Islamic State units cannot always be readily identified by American pilots flying overhead.

The administration is considering training a cadre of Iraqi troops to designate airstrike targets from allied fighter jets.

Canadian special forces advising Iraqi troops are designating targets “on a case-by-case basis,” said Ashley Lemire, a spokeswoman for the Canadian defense ministry.

The American-led coalition has imposed other conditions on its use of airstrikes. During the operation in March and April to liberate Tikrit, the United States initially refrained from bombing runs because of the involvement of Iranian-backed Shiite militias in the fighting who were not under Iraqi government control. Once those militias failed to retake the city, they pulled back, and the Americans began bombing before Iraqi security forces and the militias advanced.

Iraqi officials have praised those airstrikes as an important component in the liberation of Tikrit. But many of the Iraqis involved in that operation complain that the Americans refused to strike targets that they had provided.

One army commander in Salahuddin Province, of which Tikrit is the capital, said he had passed along a long list of potential targets, including weapons caches, training centers and the homes of local Islamic State leaders.

“The least important 5 percent of them were targeted,” said the officer, who was not authorized to speak publicly and did not want to be identified as criticizing Iraq’s ally. “We also asked the U.S. coalition to attack ISIS convoys while they were moving from one place to another, but they either neglected our requests or responded very late.”

These same Iraqi commanders drew criticism on Sunday from Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Iraq’s troops had shown no will to fight in Ramadi and had abandoned the city.

Civilians from Raqqa, who were interviewed in Turkey and often go back and forth across the border, said the Islamic State offices were well known around the city and had not been targeted by coalition airstrikes. Locals assume that this is because the Islamic State holds civilian prisoners in each location to deter the coalition.

The Islamic State’s primary security office is known as Point 11 and is inside a soccer stadium, where its central prison is also believed to be. The extremists’ Islamic court is in a building that used to belong to the Syrian Finance Ministry; it, too, holds prisoners, residents say. The office of the militant group’s so-called Islamic police is also near Point 11 and contains a small jail.

An American military spokeswoman declined to comment on specific targets in Raqqa.

Civilians who now rely on the Islamic State for services often come and go from the offices, according to a middle-aged real estate agent who lives in Raqqa and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of the extremists.

“The civilians like the coalition because it doesn’t hit civilians, but ISIS hates it because it targets their fighters,” he said.

But even residents who oppose the Islamic State said they could not imagine the group’s leaving Raqqa at this time, because it has learned to deal with the airstrikes and there is no force on the ground to challenge it.

“If they had acted when ISIS was small, they could have stopped them, but now it has settled and grown, and people have gotten used to it,” said an aid worker from Raqqa who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he travels in areas controlled by the Islamic State. “As long as there is no plan to get rid of them, they are staying, and it is clear that there is no plan.”[source]

File image of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-proclaimed leader of ISIS.

By Pamela Engel

The head of the Islamic State is reportedly injured so badly he can barely move, Kareem Shaheen at The Guardian reports.
"Sources tell us Baghdadi is still alive, but still unable to move due to spinal injury sustained in the March air strike," Shaheen tweeted.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who last year declared himself "caliph" of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh), was reportedly wounded in a US-led air strike in March.
Martin Chulov at The Guardian, who last week broke the news of the air strike, also says his sources tell him that Baghdadi is still alive and is being treated by doctors from Mosul. He has reportedly suffered a spinal injury.
Information on Baghdadi's reported injury and the air strike that supposedly caused it is still sketchy.
Two officials, one Western and one Iraqi, confirmed to The Guardian that the air strike targeted multiple cars in the town of Baaj in northwestern Iraq on March 18, but the Pentagon said the air strike was not aimed at a high-value target and that they "have no reason to believe it was Baghdadi."
Chulov reports that officials didn't know that Baghdadi was in one of the cars targeted in the airstrike. He was reportedly staying in that area of Iraq because he "knew from the war that the Americans did not have much cover there," a source who is aware of Baghdadi's movements told The Guardian.
Baghdadi is reportedly recovering slowly but has not resumed day-to-day control of ISIS. A former physics teacher from Mosul was installed as ISIS's new temporary leader while Baghdadi recovers, an Iraqi government adviser told Newsweek last week.
ISIS control zones as of April 2015
Newsweek describes Abu Alaa Afri as a "rising star" within ISIS, and the Iraqi government adviser, Hisham al Hashimi, said Afri had become even more important than the injured "caliph" of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Afri will become ISIS' new permanent leader if Baghdadi dies, Hashimi said.
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 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," would "give the group a religious face."[source]