Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who purportedly appeared in a video for the first time in five years, is threatening revenge and a 'long battle' ahead.
In the 18-minute video from the Al Furqan network, a bearded man with Baghdadi’s appearance says the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka were IS’s response to losses in its last territorial stronghold of Baghouz in Syria.
The group will seek revenge for jailed and killed members, he says, calling for militants operating in west Africa to multiply attacks against “Crusader France and its allies”.
The authenticity and date of the recording could not be independently verified.
The video would be the first from al-Baghdadi since he was filmed in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014. More recent speeches have been released as audio recordings.
This image purports to show the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, being interviewed by an IS media outlet. Source: AAP
US government analysts "will review this recording and we will defer to the intelligence community to confirm its authenticity," the State Department spokesman said.
But regardless of the video's authenticity, the spokesman said that the so called Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, had been battered.
"ISIS's territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria was a crushing strategic and psychological blow as ISIS saw its so-called caliphate crumble, its leaders killed or flee the battlefield, and its savagery exposed," he said.
In the clip, al-Baghdadi acknowledged defeat in the group's last stronghold in Syria but vowed a "long battle" ahead.
IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in his first public appearance in Mosul, Iraq on July 5, 2014, left, and at right, on Monday, April 29, 2019, Source: AAP
The speaker appears to be in good health and looks like a slightly older version of Baghdadi than when he was pictured in 2014, addressing followers from a pulpit to declare a caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria.
In the footage released on Monday, he is dressed in black robes and a beige waistcoat, with a long graying beard dyed red at the bottom. A rifle leans against the wall behind him.
“Our battle today is a battle of attrition with the enemy ... Jihad continues until judgment day, and God ordered us to jihad, but not to victory,” he said.
The last time al-Baghdadi appeared on camera he delivered a sermon at the al-Nuri mosque in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014.
In that video, he appeared as a black-robed figure with a trimmed black beard to deliver a sermon from the pulpit of the mosque in which he urged Muslims around the world to swear allegiance to the caliphate and obey him as its leader.
Al-Bagdadi acknowledged that IS lost the war in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz, which was captured last month by the US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
"In fact, the battle of Islam and its people against the Crusaders and their followers is a long battle," he said.
Referring to the setbacks in battle, he said the "brothers" of the many fallen fighters "will avenge that, as they will not forget as long as they have blood in their veins, and there will be a battle after this one".
It is unclear when or where the video was filmed. Al-Baghdadi spoke slowly and haltingly in the video.
With a $US25 million ($A35 million) bounty on his head, al-Baghdadi is the world's most wanted man, responsible for steering his chillingly violent organisation into the mass slaughter of opponents, and directing and inspiring terror attacks across continents and in the heart of Europe.
Despite numerous claims about his death in the past few years, al-Baghdadi's whereabouts remain a mystery.
Since he appeared in public in 2014 many of his top aides have been killed, mostly in US-led coalition airstrikes.
He is among the few senior IS commanders still at large after two years of steady battlefield losses that saw the self-styled "caliphate" shrink from an area the size of Britain to a tiny speck in the Euphrates River valley.
Although largely seen as a symbolic figurehead of the global terror network - he was described as "irrelevant for a long time" by a coalition spokesman in 2017 - al-Baghdadi's capture would be a coveted prize for the various players across both Syria and Iraq.
But so far, he has eluded the Americans, Russians, Syrians, Iraqis and Kurds.
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