'Caliph's' fate.

Byline: Mahir Ali

GOOD riddance, unequivocally. The man who adopted the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was by most accounts a monster of depravity. The mindless brutality of the outfit he presided over is incontestable, and it conforms with multiple testimonies about his personal predilections, including a reputation as a serial rapist.

It does not follow, of course, that the account of his final moments offered by the US president deserves to be taken at face value. Donald Trump simply cannot help uttering untruths almost every time he opens his mouth, so it's perfectly possible his insistence that the cornered quarry was 'whimpering' and 'screaming' before he detonated his suicide vest in a dead-end tunnel was a product of the presidential imagination.

He was, after all, barely able to pronounce Baghdadi's name while taking full credit for the hunt. He also claimed that access to real-time video in the White House Situation Room (right after a Saturday afternoon bout of golf, mind you) was like watching a movie, even though the aerial footage being transmitted depicted only heat signatures in the dark and could not possibly have penetrated the tunnel.

His defence secretary as well as the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, both of whom were present in the Situation Room, refused to corroborate Trump's narrative, but said he might have listened to eyewitness accounts from forces on the ground.

IS was incubated by the consequences of the US invasion of Iraq.

Trump could not conceivably have had access by that point to video footage from cameras worn by special forces commandos, and it is in fact not even clear whether any of them witnessed Baghdadi's explosive exit. Only a military dog, described by the commander-in-chief as 'talented' and 'beautiful' (although its name is classified information), is said to have been seriously injured when the leader of the militant Islamic State group, in the president's parlance, 'died like a dog'. Even his animal instincts are contradictory.

There are contested versions of where the crucial evidence for locating Baghdadi's hideout in Syria's northern Idlib province came from, with both the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and the Iraqi authorities claiming credit, amid other indications that the information pinpointing Baghdadi's refuge possibly owned by the leader of a separate group associated with Al Qaeda was derived from the interrogation of one of his wives (two others are said to have...