How A Talented Footballer Became World’s Most Wanted Man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, one of the world’s most wanted jihadist leaders, was once simply considered his mosque’s best football player.

The only time the polite, bespectacled student shone was on the football field, playing for the team from the local mosque.

“He was the Messi of our team,” said Abu Ali, a fellow player and worshipper at the mosque, making comparison with the Lionel Messi, the Argentinian striker. “He was our best player.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the impressive striker, is now the world’s most wanted jihadist leader.

In interviews with the Telegraph, contemporaries of Baghdadi trace how he went from being a shy, unimpressive, religious scholar and man who eschewed violence, to an infamously dangerous extremist, self-appointed caliph and reputed heir to Osama bin Laden.

Born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri to a family of preachers, the now-leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant lived his childhood in the Sunni heartland town of Samarra north of Baghdad.