World gets rid of one more terrorist

The world became one terrorist less on Sunday, when the world woke up to the good news that al-Baghdadi, cornered by elite US special forces and their dogs, had died in a tunnel hide-out in North-western Syria.

Globally, the only other event that can be compared to this is the killing of former Al-Qaeda Chief Osama Bin Laden by the US Navy Seals in Pakistan, during the Barack Obama administration. Incidentally Bin Laden's son too was killed last month.

But the killing of Baghdadi is a bigger deal than any of these, mainly because Baghdadi oversaw the birth and expansion of the most brutal terrorist organisation the modern world has seen. Its modus operandi was so vicious that even hardcore cadres of Al-Qaeda and Taliban, themselves no strangers to brutality, sought to distance themselves from the ISIS.

Baghdadi was the elimination of currently the most powerful symbol and persona of religious-extremist terrorism. The very nature of this kind of terrorist movement indicates that simply the elimination of a single leader will not end this tendency to violence.

-Jayatheertha S A, Nacharam, Hyderabad