Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Ugly Legacy
In the Syrian rebel’s telling, he’d encountered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi without even realizing it.
It was early in Syria’s civil war, he explained, before the Islamic State surged to global notoriety. The jihadist group was then still in a tenuous partnership with rebel groups such as his in an insurgency against the Bashar al-Assad regime. During occasional meetings with ISIS leaders, the rebel said, he’d noticed a quiet man who seemed to be something like a secretary. This man would serve the guests tea, then blend into the background. Only later, when the man became infamous as the world’s most wanted terrorist, did the rebel recognize him as Baghdadi.
I heard this story in the chaotic early days of the U.S. war against ISIS and never confirmed it—instead, I considered it a
