Ever since Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi put on a black robe and turban to ascend a mosque pulpit in Iraq and proclaim to rule over the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims last year, he’s surrounded himself by symbols of doomsday. 

In addition to his attire, he named the group’s English-language magazine after the Syrian town where some Sunni tradition says Islam’s Armageddon is supposed to happen. Many of his foreign fighters were lured to the self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq by the promise of a ringside seat for the end of the world. 

As the attacks in Paris unite world powers to hit back at Islamic State and reverse its territorial expansion, they also play into that more apocalyptic narrative of the jihadist group and its leader. The slaying of at least 129 people by militants linked to the group, bombings in Beirut and Ankara and the downing of a Russian plane over Egypt show Baghdadi inciting the kind of response that would escalate his war.

“The attacks all work within a strategy of provocation,” said Charlie Winter, who studies Islamic State propaganda and was recently appointed as a senior research associate at Georgia State University.  “They also lend it credibility as a jihadist organization.”           

And:

“It may want to build a caliphate, but it may also be just fine trying to trigger an apocalyptic war between civilizations,” said Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. 

Under Baghdadi’s leadership, Islamic State sought to acquire all the trappings of a functional state based in Raqqa, even minting its own coins. Using a slick propaganda machine to help build its brand while funded from extortion and illegal oil, it eclipsed al-Qaeda to turn into the richest and most brutal of terrorist groups.

Unlike the self-publicity of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, relatively little is known about Baghdadi, whose real name is Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. 

He was born into a pious family in the Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971. Neighbors remember him as a shy teenager, according to a profile by William McCants, author of “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State.” When he wasn’t in school, he was praying or studying the Koran, earning him the nickname “The Believer.”

David Fuller's view

In the paragraph just above you will see some light reading for the yearend holidays, if you are interested in this subject.  I will try to resist it.  

We know there have always been crackpot pseudo-religious groups, usually the inspiration a single charismatic leader with a doomsday vision.  They attract emotionally vulnerable malcontents and society’s losers, who find their life’s meaning in the forecast of an apocalypse, from which they may even achieve salvation.  

Most cults are small in numbers and based in remote locations, ensuring that they are primarily dangers to themselves.  Occasionally, they become much larger, as we have seen with the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’, increasingly called Daesh.   

Daesh remains well financed, due to raids, extortion and the sale of crude oil from production facilities which they have seized.  Consequently, Daesh has a sadistically glamorous adventure appeal for disillusioned, impressionable Arab youths living in the West who are often unemployed and in minor trouble with the police.  These people are easily radicalised, as we have seen.

Will this problem be reduced by the army of young refugees and economic migrants arriving on Europe’s borders?  I doubt it but hope to be wrong on this point. 

(See also: France Intensifies Assault on Islamic State at Home and Abroad and Ending Islamic State Inc.)