Time magazine has named Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi (The Islamic State Leader) as the runner-up for its Person of the Year award.
The candidate was chosen by the publication’s editors because “as leader of Isis, [he] has inspired followers to both fight in his self-declared caliphate of Iraq and Syria, and also stage attacks in countries like Tunisia and France”.
Time says the shortlist is for a person, object or idea which, ‘for better or for worse…has done the most to influence the events of the year.’
In 2015, the IS leader transformed a breakaway al-Qaeda group into a “transnational terrorist franchise”, killing more than 1,600 people in over 80 attacks in 20 countries in 18 months.
Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi holds degrees in Islamic Studies, including poetry, history and genealogy, from the Islamic University of Baghdad.
Baghdadi has the reputation of a highly organised and ruthless battlefield tactician who seldom appears in the media and rarely reveals his face, even to IS members. For this reason, he has been dubbed “the invisible sheikh”.
Previous winners have included Hitler, Stalin and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.
Read More: http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2015-runner-up-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi/?iid=toc
