The United States vowed Monday that it would track down and defeat surviving leaders of the Islamic State movement or the ISIS group after its elusive supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared to speak in a newly released videotape.
The US-led coalition against the group will fight across the world to “ensure an enduring defeat of these terrorists and that any leaders who remain are delivered the justice that they deserve,” a State Department spokesman said.
In Baghdadi’s first purported appearance in five years, a cross-legged speaker said to be the world’s most-wanted man referred to the group’s defeat last month in its final redoubt of Baghouz and threatened revenge attacks.
“The battle for Baghouz is over,” the man said, sitting cross-legged on a cushion and addressing three men whose faces have been blurred.
But he insisted that ISIS’s operations against the West were part of a “long battle,” and that ISIS would “take revenge” on members who had been killed.
“There will be more to come after this battle,” he said.
Baghdadi, 47, had a long grey beard that appeared dyed with henna and spoke slowly, often pausing for several seconds in the middle of his sentences.
He appeared for the first and last time in public in Mosul in 2014, where he declared an Islamic “caliphate” in the swathes of territory IS then held in Syria and Iraq.
He was reported killed or injured multiple times since then.
His last voice recording to his supporters was released in August, eight months after Iraq announced it had defeated ISIS and as US-backed forces closed in next door in Syria.
US government analysts “will review this recording and we will defer to the intelligence community to confirm its authenticity,” the State Department spokesman said.
But regardless of the video’s authenticity, the spokesman said that the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, had been battered.
“ISIS’s territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria was a crushing strategic and psychological blow as ISIS saw its so-called caliphate crumble, its leaders killed or flee the battlefield, and its savagery exposed,” he said.