The only time the polite, bespectacled student shone was on the football field, while playing for the team from the local mosque.
“He was the Messi of our team,” said Abu Ali, a fellow player and worshipper at the mosque, making comparison with the Lionel Messi, the Argentinian striker. “He was our best player.”
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the impressive striker, is now one of the world’s most wanted jihadist leaders.
In interviews with the Telegraph, contemporaries of Baghdadi trace the life of a man who went from being a shy religious scholar who eschewed violence, to one a infamously dangerous extremists, self-appointed caliph and reputed heir to Osama bin Laden.
Born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri to a family of preachers, the now leader of the Islamic State, lived his childhood in the Sunni heartland town of Samarra north of Baghdad.
But it is in the Iraqi capital that he spent his formative years, studying for his undergraduate and masters degrees, and eventually his PhD at the Islamic University.
For more than a decade, until 2004, he lived in a room attached to a small local mosque in Tobchi, a poor and ramshackle neighbourhood of made up of Sunni and Shia Muslim residents on the western fringes of Baghdad.
Tobchi’s streets are cut off from the rest of Baghdad by rudimentary rubble blockades.
Sitting in his living room with the curtains drawn, as his brother kept a careful watch for militias outside, Abu Ali said: “When Ibrahim al-Badri arrived in Tobchi he was 18-years-old. He was a quiet person, and very polite.”
“He wasn’t a preacher as people say,” he added, referring to a profile recently published by the Islamic State that heralds Baghdadi as a grand imam. “The mosque here had it’s own imam. When the imam was away, religious students would take his place. [Baghdadi] would sometimes lead the prayers but not give any sermons.”
Abu Ali did though concede that: “He had a nice voice, which was just right for the prayers.”
He came to know Baghdadi through group activities put on by the mosque clergy: “We’d play football. In Saddam’s time we’d all travel to places outside Baghdad, such as Anbar district, for picnics, or go we’d go swimming.”
Abu Ali, a man well over six feet high, described the young man’s appearance: “He was a little shorter than me. He had a medium beard.”
He said that he had seen the mugshot, posted online by the United States government with a reward of $10 million for his capture: “I recognised him in the picture. Except that when I knew him he wore glasses. He was very short sighted.”
The jihadist-to-be had been a “conservative Salafi” practitioner of Islam, his former neighbour said: “I remember one incident where was a wedding in the area and men and women were dancing and jumping happily in the same room. He was walking past on the street and saw this. He shouted ’How can men and women be dancing together like this? It’s irreligious’. He stopped the dance.”
When he finished his PhD, which was focused on the study of sharia law, at the start of this millennium, Baghdadi married and, less than a year later, his wife gave birth to their first child. The boy is now approximately 11-years-old.
As the war drums rumbled against then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and then when the allies invaded in 2003, Baghdadi continued to live the life of a family man.
“He didn’t show any hostility to the Americans,” said Abu Ali. “He wasn’t like the hot blooded ones. He must have been a quiet planner.”
The drama for Baghdadi came one year later, when he had a disagreement with the owner of the local mosque, who was also his landlord, and was then vanquished both from his home and then from Tobchi, residents said.
“The mosque owner wanted him to join the Islamic Party, a political group he was part of,” said Abu Ali.
Possibly because, in the Salafist doctrine, political parties are sacrilegious, challenging the rule of God, Baghdadi refused. The disagreement turned into a shouting match, and “then they scuffled”.
In 2004 the owner of the mosque ordered him to leave his home. And then, as the residents of Tobchi shared the same tribal affiliations as the mosque owner, Baghdadi found himself no longer welcome in the neighbourhood.
“Now the mosque owner lives abroad. He is afraid to return to Iraq in case Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi will seek his revenge,” added Abu Ali.
The Tobchi resident said little is known of what happened next to the jihadist, whose has now eclipsed Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri as the most violent, psychotic extremist, with his men regularly conducting beheadings and crucifixions on their accused, as well as using torture routinely.
He next heard that “Sheikh Ibrahim” as Baghdadi had come to be locally known in Tobchi, was “in prison”.
The profile of Baghdadi given to the Telegraph by Ahmed al-Dabash, the leader of the Islamic Army of Iraq who fought against the allied invasion in 2003 and whose group is now fighting alongside the Baghdadi’s Islamic State with the intention of ousting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, matches that of the Tobchi resident.
“I was with Baghdadi at the Islamic University. We studied the same course, but he wasn’t a friend. He was quiet, and retiring. He spent time alone,” said Mr Dabash.
Later, when he helped found the Islamic Army, Mr Dabash fought alongside militia leaders who were committing some of the worst excesses in violence and would later form al-Qaeda.
“I used to know all the leaders [of the insurgency] personally. Zarqawi [the former leader of al-Qaeda] was closer than a brother to me,” he said.
“But I didn’t know Baghdadi. He was insignificant. He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”
US intelligence reports record that by 2005 al-Badri had moved to a dusty town of Qaim in the Sunni Iraqi province of Anbar. Then going by the pseudonym of Abu Duaa, he was accused of being connected to the torture and the “public execution” of local civilians.
But according to Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi security strategist who has met Baghdadi in prison said believed that it was a subsequent prison stint in an American jail which cemented al-Badri’s taste for extremism.
Baghdadi was thrown into the sprawling American run Camp Bucca in late 2005.
But even whilst under their lock and key, Baghdadi cut such an innocuous figure that he slipped through the US’ net. Failing identify him as particularly dangerous individual, guards released Baghdadi when the prison shut down in 2009.
“He was a bad dude but he wasn’t the worst of the worst,” Colonel Kenneth King, then Camp Bucca’s commanding officer, told the Daily Beast.
His parting comment, “I’ll see you guys in New York”, was not seen as a threat by the guards.
Inside the prison Baghdadi is believed to have met with and been radicalised by jihadists from al-Qaeda, the group holding a reign of terror after the Iraqi invasion, with daily suicide bombings in towns and cities.
When released he re-affirmed his membership to al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group which, even after it’s leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by a US airstrike in 2006 was known for its extreme violence.
Its members would routinely behead victims with rusty knives, strap suicide bombs on to the mentally disabled to then be remotely detonated in when the person walked into a crowd and hide explosives in corpses to kill funeral-goers.
A year later, in 2010, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, Zarqawi’s successor, also died in a US air strike raid in 2010.
It is here, that for the first time, the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became known. In a dramatic ascent, the quiet scholar suddenly emerged as the man elected to lead al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq.
“It’s still a mystery why they chose specifically Baghdadi to lead. There were many others who had been in the organisation before him,” said Mr Hashimi. “He was elected by a Shura council [a religious consultative assembly], in Iraq’s northern province of Ninevah. And there, nine of the 11 people voted in favour of Baghdadi.”
Baghdadi’s next break, which cemented his infamy, was his decision to dispatch his men to fight in the civil war in neighbouring Syria.
Joined by thousands of foreign fighters, including from Britain, Baghdadi and his men wrested control of the northern Syrian city of Raqqa from the grasp of both the Syrian regime and domestic insurgent groups.
Next they captured most of the country’s oil fields in the neighbouring provinces of Deir al-Zour, creating a lucrative source of revenue as the jihadists sold on the crude liquid to other parts of Syria, and smuggled it to neighbouring Turkey.
For two years, the group - then renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham - grew in size and in influence, even breaking away from al-Qaeda proper after Baghdadi ignored orders by al-Qaeda’s Zawaheri to keep his organisation strictly in Iraq.
Established in Syria, and with having built local support networks in Iraq, last month Baghdadi struck his most ambitious blow.
Returning some of his men to Iraq he seized Mosul, Iraq’s second city in the north of the country, and then advanced towards Baghdad, sending the Iraqi army fleeing from most of the north of the country.
A slick propaganda wing helped the advance, with Baghdadi’s allies on Twitter and other social media sites, circulating gruesome images of the overtly sectarian massacres the group was committing.
The images of more than one hundred of Shia soldiers from Tikrit, lying in a gutter on a roadside, their hands tied behind their backs as they were summarily executed, causing tens of thousands of people to flee from their homes.
The geeky former student’s ambitions did not stop there however. Earlier this week, at the start of the holy Muslim festival of Ramadan, Baghdadi issued a “joyous” statement announcing the achievement of his long time ambition to build an “Islamic State”.
His group, he said, were no longer Isis, but the leaders of an Islamic state made of territory that was once northern Syria and northern Iraq.
He is known to be more calculating than his predecessors, reportedly aborting missions if he feels they are too dangerous for his men.
His organisation has more structure than ever before, with underlings assigned to specific roles such as the management of finance, or propaganda.
But in this calm there is a cold blooded psychopathy, in which Baghdadi does not forget to seek revenge on his foes.
Jamal al-Hamdani, one of the two men in the Shura council who did not vote for Baghdadi to be leader was later assassinated because of his objection, Hamdani said.
Now, the leader has issued statements demanding, first the toppling of Baghdad, and then the inclusion of the Gulf and Jordan in is caliphate.
In fact, he boasted in his recorded speech, his men would not stop conquering ground until they reached “Rome”.
The statements are mostly impassioned propaganda. Throughout history, attempts to build an Islamic caliphate have collapsed into disarray. After 2003 in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq went into decline when its extremist policies were rejected by the Sunni Iraqi’s they were trying to rule.
In the space of three years however the former football enthusiast has helped transform his group that was a fringe movement to be best equipped, best funded militia of modern times.
It is clear that behind the calculating silence there is in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi a character of unending ambition, who will never again be underestimated.
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