Washington Post headline: "Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State dies at 48."

Look at this, on the front-page at The Washington Post:


It's as though the paper is honoring him.

I wonder how long that will stay on the front page in that form. It's the teaser for obituary, and there is another article — to the left — about the military raid, "Trump says Islamic State leader Baghdadi blew himself up as U.S. troops closed in." Note how that forefronts Baghdadi's agency. He "blew himself up."

If you click through to the obituary, the headline is different — "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State’s ‘terrorist-in-chief,’ dies at 48." So that makes the form of the headline on the front page even more startling — "Austere religious scholar..."

The obituary has that "austere religious scholar" language in the first paragraph and proceeds to tell his story within that framework:

When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took the reins of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2010, few had heard of the organization or its new leader, an austere religious scholar with wire-frame glasses and no known aptitude for fighting and killing....

[D]espite [ISIS]’s extremist views and vicious tactics, Mr. Baghdadi maintained a canny pragmatism as leader, melding a fractious mix of radical jihadists and former Iraqi Baathists and army officers into an effective military force. It was this combination of extremist ideology and practical military experience that enabled the group to seize and hold territory that would form the basis of a declared Islamic caliphate....

He graduated from the University of Baghdad in 1996 and received a master’s degree in Koranic recitation from the Saddam University for Islamic Studies in 1999.... By 2003, at age 31, he was well on his way to a doctorate and a shot at a full professorship. But after U.S. troops invaded Iraq that year, he signed up with a local resistance movement...

He was arrested in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 and, in a fateful turn, landed at the notorious and now-defunct Camp Bucca prison. The vast, U.S.-run detention facility warehoused nearly 26,000 Iraqi men at a time in communal tents, and U.S. military officials later acknowledged that it served at times as a recruitment and training center for jihadists.

“Extremists mingled with moderates in every compound,” Vasilios Tasikas, who served at the time as a Coast Guard lieutenant commander in charge of legal operations at the prison, wrote in a 2009 essay in the Military Review. Over time, he wrote, the mixing of hardened jihadists and Iraqi civilians “fueled the insurgency inside the wire.”...

[I]n 2014, Mr. Baghdadi... announc[ed] the founding of the caliphate... [with himself] as the living heir to the line of great warrior-emirs from Islam’s early history.

In his dress and movements, he symbolically evoked the prophet himself, from his black turban and robe to the traditional miswak, a carved wooden teeth-cleaning stick that Muhammad was said to have favored.

ADDED: The oldest comment at the WaPo obituary is:

Foreshadowing? (fingers-crossed)

President Trump “had run into a ‘dead-end tunnel’ before he ‘ignited his vest,’ killing himself and three of his children,

And that is followed by:

That would be too kind. Trump has earned public humiliation and global scorn. He deserves to suffer. Locked-in syndrome sounds appropriate. We can parade him around and pelt him with offal.

Incredible.

ADDED: They've changed it. As of 11:34 (CT), the front page teaser for the obituary is "Extremist leader of Islamic State dies at 48":