Opinion | Islamic State: Landless but Still Dangerous

The group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, re-emerges in a video, warning that while the caliphate may be gone, the jihad continues.

The 18-minute video clip had all the jihadist clichés — the terrorist leader sitting cross-legged on a flowered mattress in an anonymous room, his full beard dyed with henna, a faux-military fishing vest over his black robe and a custom AK-47 at his side, with lieutenants nearby, faces obscured. Osama bin Laden had used the same props, as had Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the first leader of the Islamic State, or ISIS.

The image was the message: the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wanted his far-flung followers to know that he was still alive and in command, and that the ISIS terror network was functioning despite the loss of the broad “caliphate” it once viciously controlled across Iraq and Syria — and despite a $25-million bounty on his head. The terror war against the “Crusaders” was far from over: “Our battle today is a battle of attrition,” Mr. al-Baghdadi intoned in a low voice, “and we will prolong it for the enemy, and they must know that the jihad will continue until Judgment Day.”

The tedious familiarity of the scene and the apocalyptic talk, however, made them no less menacing. Mr. al-Baghdadi apparently made the video sometime after ISIS was driven out of its last sliver of territory, the village of Baghuz in Syria, on March 23. But the organization had been declared dead before, only to come back with a vengeance. And indeed, a week before the video was made public, suicide bombers allied with ISIS struck in churches and high-end hotels across Sri Lanka, killing at least 253. An audio message appended to the clip declared that this was “vengeance for their brothers in Baghuz.”

Mr. al-Baghdadi had last appeared in a video five years earlier when he mounted the pulpit of the Al Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq, to proclaim a caliphate, an Islamic state, with himself as the caliph. His trademark was extraordinary cruelty even by the depraved standards of earlier jihadists, with prisoners publicly beheaded, captive women raped and suicide bombers dispatched on hundreds of missions.