The Mysterious al Baghdadi

Last week the US government said that the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, had been killed in a joint US-Iraqi raid. Which is interesting, because the Iraqi government has reported killing or capturing him half a dozen times before, and the US government has at times said that al Baghdadi does not even exist:

It was a bit different this time, in that U.S. officials confirmed the death reports, as they hadn’t before. But the better question might be how many times al-Baghdadi has been born. The Times noted that al-Baghdadi was “once said to be fictional”—and the ones doing the saying were not conspiracy theorists but American officials (there is a difference). There was speculation that al-Baghdadi was a name picked up and passed around by several different people, like Green Lantern. Back on July 19, 2007, the Times wrote that Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said that al-Baghdadi was a “ruse,” a fake Iraqi everyman invented by foreign Al Qaeda fighters to “mask the outsiders’ dominant role.” The one who dreamed him up, according to Bergner, was al-Masri—the other man killed Sunday.

As the NY Times once put it

U.S. Says Insurgent Leader It Couldn’t Find Never Was

The US Army says that this time they are sure. But how do they know?