WaPo, Liz Sly & Souad Mekhennet from Beirut, 3:40 pm ET:

ISIS leader Baghdadi makes first video appearance in 5 years, emphasizes group’s global reach

[....] The timing of the video, released by the Islamic State’s Furqan channel, seemed to confirm the widespread belief that he survived the Islamic State’s final stand in the battle of Baghouz in eastern Syria last month. Iraqi and U.S. officials say he is thought to be hiding out in the desert in either Syria or Iraq, but the video gave no indication of his location.

Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, said the video illustrates the “serious danger” that Baghdadi still poses as the Islamic State’s leader. His appearance demonstrates not only that Baghdadi is still alive, “but also that he is able to reemerge to his supporters and reaffirm the group’s us-vs-the-world message after all the progress made against the group,” Katz said in a posting on her Twitter account.

The message of congratulations to the Easter attackers in Sri Lanka is delivered in a separate, audio segment at the end of the video, suggesting that it was added after the video was made. Baghdadi described the attacks on churches and hotels, in which at least 250 people died, as revenge for the deaths of Islamic State fighters in the battle of Baghouz, and not for the white extremist attack on two mosques in New Zealand in March, as the Sri Lankan government has claimed. “This is part of the vengeance that awaits the Crusaders and their henchmen” he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE monitoring service. 

Tellingly, he also thanks the attackers for their pledge of ­allegiance to the Islamic State, without claiming a direct role for the group in orchestrating the bombings.

References in the video to other recent events, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s April 9 election victory in Israel, the April 11 coup in Sudan and the resignation of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, indicate, however, that the main video recording was made this month, between April 11 and 22 [....]

Robin Wright weighs in @ NewYorker.com: 

Baghdadi Is Back—and Vows That ISIS Will Be, Too, April 29

[....] The video of Baghdadi seemed designed to refute President Trump’s claim, in February, that the U.S.-led coalition of more than seventy nations had eliminated the Islamic State “one hundred per cent.” Baghdadi claimed that isis offshoots—or “provinces,” as they are dubbed—have carried out ninety-two attacks in eight countries, even as its fighters were losing territory in Iraq and Syria. [....]

Baghdadi has repeatedly surprised the outside world, beginning with his revival, in Iraq, of the Al Qaeda franchise, which had been forced underground and had only a few hundred followers in 2007. Over the next seven years, he converted the jihadi movement into the Islamic State caliphate, with tens of thousands of fighters recruited from more than eighty countries. He has eluded capture while more than a hundred other isis leaders have been picked off in U.S. air strikes.

“Baghdadi’s survival despite a massive manhunt and the successful military campaign is impressive,” Daniel Byman, a Brookings Institution scholar and the author of the new book “Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad,” told me. “It shows the Islamic State retains functioning networks and considerably clandestine capacity in Iraq and Syria.” [....]

Baghdadi claimed that the underground movement is expanding, even as it loses turf. He congratulated two groups, in Mali and Burkina Faso, for recently pledging formal allegiance to isis and “enrollment in the ranks of the caliphate.” He praised its Burkina Faso branch for its attack on French forces and called specifically for more attacks against France, as well as other “crusader” nations [....]

“One thing in particular stands out in terms of looking forward,” Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the founder of the Web site Jihadology, said. “When the video highlights the various areas Abu Bakr is being briefed on, it shows a folder that says Wilayat [Province] Turkey.” isis has not embraced a formal franchise in Turkey, so the reference “suggests potential future targets and willingness to possibly begin an insurgency or attempt to take territory there,” Zelin said.

On Monday, the U.S. intelligence community was analyzing the tape for authenticity, a State Department official told me. The Trump Administration is still claiming that it has the upper hand. “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,” the official said. But he acknowledged that “this fight is not finished.”

Middle East experts and terrorist specialists were more cynical. “The international community should not kid itself—isis remains a serious force, even in Syria and Iraq,” Lister, the fellow from the Middle East Institute, told me. “In eastern Syria alone, isis appears to have conducted over eighty-five attacks since the loss of Baghouz, its final picket of territory. That’s no small feat. Thousands of fighters remain in operation, and the scale of the problem isis has left behind far eclipses what the U.S. left behind in Iraq, in 2010.” isis, he added, has existed and thrived without territory for longer than it controlled land. “I don’t think isis is desperate at all but supremely confident that they’ve set into stone conditions in which its future is now secure.”