From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily.

Today, the life and death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

My colleague Natalie Kydrowf talks to Ruth Mimi Kalamaki about the man who created ISIS.

It's Tuesday, October 29th.

Rukmini, who was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the caliph of the Islamic State. He was the leader of this terrorist

group that at its height controlled territory, the size of Great Britain in Iraq and Syria,

that drew in tens of thousands of recruits from 100 countries, 40,000, we believe,

and that succeeded in carrying out attacks not just in Iraq and Syria, not just in Paris and

Brussels, but in a total of, at the last count, I had 40 different countries around the world.

So how does one become that? How do you become the leader of a caliphate?

What my reporting has shown is that it's actually not what people say it was. People think that he

was radicalized at Camp Buka in the year 2004, which is right after the US-led invasion of Iraq.

When Baghdadi is picked up in a raid that was in fact aiming to get his brother-in-law.

He has taken to an American facility, Camp Buka, and in Camp Buka, the theory goes,

he rubbed shoulders with the future leaders of the insurgency, and it was there that he became

radicalized through those people and through his hatred of the American occupiers.

This has been out in biographies of Baghdadi, said by the top analysts who are in this field,

but in fact, when you go and speak to the people who were incarcerated with him,

you realize that he showed up already radicalized. So in order to understand who he is,

you have to back up and you have to go to, I would say, his childhood and his teenage years.

And what was his childhood like? He came from a modest family from a village called Al-Jalam

...