For nearly a year, Islamic State-watchers had wondered whether Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the group, was alive. Then on Wednesday, he resurfaced for the for the first time in 11 months, releasing a recorded speech to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. In the 55-minute speech—his longest of those that have been made public—he referenced recent events, indicating that it was recorded over the past few weeks.
The speech came amid reports of a resurgence by ISIS in Diyala, Salah ad-Din, and Kirkuk in Iraq, all areas the group lost some years ago; overall the group has lost around 98 percent of the areas it once controlled. The speech also followed eyebrow-, raising estimates by both the Pentagon and the United Nations that the group still has more than 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria. Affiliates in countries like Afghanistan and Egypt have also been noticeably more deadly and active in recent months. ISIS, in other words, has seemingly undergone an orderly transition from caliphate to insurgency without fracturing. In his speech, an emboldened Baghdadi drew on ISIS’s history—a small militia within a large network of insurgent groups waging war against Americans—to rally the faithful, and remind them that they remain quite deadly.
What ISIS really wants

Aside from its preachy opening, Baghdadi’s speech charted a course for how ISIS can regroup. In one key passage, he called for lone-actor attacks in Western countries, including bombings, car-rammings, and gun and knife attacks. Previously, such calls only came from ISIS’s former spokesman; coming from the self-styled caliph himself, they’re likely to carry more weight. Baghdadi even quantified his expectations: One attack in the West equals a thousand in the Middle East—a ratio that recalls the Irish Republican Army’s campaign of terror in Britain decades ago, which stipulated that one bomb in Britain was worth 100 in Northern Ireland. ISIS, like the violent Irish nationalists before them, knows that such attacks will garner more publicity and spark greater reaction than the slaughter of 200 Druze civilians in southern Syria or a car bombing in the heart of Baghdad.

Baghdadi also claimed that Donald Trump’s America is suffering a nervous breakdown as a result of its two-decade war against jihadis in the region. America, he said, is turning against its friends and cowering to its adversaries. Baghdadi cited tensions between Washington and Ankara over Turkey’s imprisoning of American pastor Andrew Brunson, U.S. sanctions against Turkey, and the Erdogan government’s refusal to abide by the U.S. sanctions regime against Iran. This is all happening, he said, while the “patch of jihad is expanding.” Indeed: Unlike in Baghdadi’s previous speeches, in which he raged against ISIS’s internal dysfunction and territorial losses, this time he seemed confident of the group’s ability to weather the current storm.



To explain how ISIS will transition into an insurgency, Baghdadi pointed to the past. He echoed the iconic words of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the original founder of the group, from 2006: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq,” a town in northern Syria that, accordingto some interpretations of Islamic tradition, will be the site of an epic battle between the Muslim and Christian armies. ISIS has often pointed to Zarqawi’s statement as prophetic, since no signs of instability in Syria had existed at the time he made it. At two points in his speech, Baghdadi referred to Iraq as the source of the spark, and said that the war has now been renewed following the loss of territory.

Baghdadi also referred to the Sunni tribal fighters that helped the United States extricate the Islamic State of Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor, from Sunni towns and cities back in 2007. Despite being outnumbered, ISI launched a successful years-long campaign to eradicate those Sunni fighters, as part of a strategy articulated also in a ratio: one bullet against the American occupier, and nine bullets against the apostates. Most of one’s forces, he suggested in the speech, should be focused on the enemy within.



Baghdadi advocated for a tactic that ISIS has turned to, with great success, numerous times: eroding Sunni factions through a combination of targeted killings and recruitment. He promised the same fate would meet the Syrian rebels, and appealed to the rank-and-file to desert their “treacherous” leaders, who he accused of betrayal after a series of ............

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