(Center For Global Policy) Tucked in a 100-page document that a dissident group within the Islamic State released in 2018 was an incredible story about a miracle. The biographical document was meant to chronicle the life of an Iraqi jihadist from being a young man with an ambition to raise pigeons to becoming one of the most influential ISIS leaders.
The biography of Abu Ali al-Anbari, ISIS’s former deputy who was killed in 2018, had clearly been meant to establish the person’s religious and tribal credentials, in case the leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was to be killed.