After reign of terror, ISIS’ Baghdadi pleads for relevance

BBC: It was a message in a bottle from the land of irrelevance. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), this week purportedly put out a voice recording to his dwindling flock of followers, exhorting them to carry on a fight they’ve already lost.
At the height of ISIS’ power in 2014, the group controlled a quasi-state roughly the size of Britain, including Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and Raqqa, its de facto capital, in Syria. Since then it has lost more than 90% of that territory and today holds sway over pockets of remote terrain straddling the two countries. In the audio message, titled “Give Glad Tidings to the Patient,” Baghdadi downplayed the loss of territory and issued the usual calls for the overthrow of hostile Arab regimes. But as much as he might dismiss ISIS’ losses, it’s hard to imagine it ever recovering.