If ISIS is defeated where is the terrorist group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

If ISIS is beaten in Iraq, why do its assassins target as many as 18 Iraqi tribal leaders a month?

If, as U.S. President Donald Trump says, the group is obliterated in Syria, why are its fighters still blowing up American troops?

Perhaps most importantly, where is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the phantom-like ISIL leader with a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head?

Such questions are animating regional experts in the wake of Trump’s proposed 2,000-troop withdrawal from Syria, the reasoning for which has been contradicted by both Pentagon and State Department analysts.

Yes, ISIL is cornered in just a handful of tiny riverside territories near the Iraq border in Syria’s southeast, having once lorded over 55,000 square kilometres of terrain. Al-Baghdadi’s cross-border caliphate project is crushed.

But his Sunni militants now fight the U.S., its coalition allies, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and Iraqi troops in a different way, and experts say the U.S. may be backing away at precisely the wrong time.

“The caliphate has been defeated or dismembered, but that’s not the same thing as saying the group has been defeated or dismembered,” says Bruce Hoffman, a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“They have a viability that isn’t going to be conquered any time soon. I don’t know of a terrorism specialist that would make that claim right now.”

If al-Baghdadi remains a ghost, he has the potential to relaunch his group from the ashes.

After all, he has already done it once before.

Source: National Post