The United States renewed its commitment to supporting its partners in the region to combat and defeat ISIS in wake of the video recording of the terror group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Monday.
The United States, which has a $25 million bounty on Baghdadi's head, said it was assessing the authenticity of the video but vowed to keep up the battle against the extremist group.
The US-led coalition will "ensure an enduring defeat of these terrorists and that any leaders who remain are delivered the justice that they deserve," a State Department spokesman said.
Even if Baghdadi is alive and well, the spokesman said that the militants had been battered.
"ISIS's territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria was a crushing strategic and psychological blow as ISIS saw its so-called caliphate crumble, its leaders killed or flee the battlefield, and its savagery exposed," he said, according to AFP.
Paris said Tuesday intelligence services are checking the authenticity of the ISIS video, but if real it would reinforce that fact that the group is still active.
“The video of al-Baghdadi - the Caliph without a caliphate - is to be considered with caution at this stage. French services are analyzing it,” French Defense Minister Florence Parly said on Twitter.
Baghdadi referred to developments in Sri Lanka and Sudan, apparently to demonstrate the video was recent.
"The mention of places like Sri Lanka and Sudan are largely to timestamp the video, to show that it wasn't created a long time ago," said Amarnath Amarasingam, senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
He said the references to lost territory were also an effort to reshape ISIS's narrative.
"Part of the importance of someone like him is to contextualize the defeat... to show that this was either an expected turn of events, or that it might be unfortunate but that it's survivable," Amarasingam told AFP.
Baghdadi made his first purported appearance in five years in a propaganda video released Monday, acknowledging ISIS's defeat in the Syrian town of Baghouz while threatening "revenge" attacks.
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The world's most wanted man was last seen in Mosul in 2014 when ISIS swept through swathes of Syria and Iraq.
Born Ibrahim Awad al-Badri in 1971, Baghdadi came from modest beginnings in Samarra, north of Baghdad.
After US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, he was detained in the American-run Camp Bucca, where he is believed to have been radicalized.
He later rose through the ranks of Iraq's al-Qaeda franchise and eventually took the helm in 2010, expanding into Syria in the midst of that country's war in 2013.
The following year, Baghdadi declared himself "caliph" of ISIS's sprawling territory in an infamous sermon from Mosul's famed al-Nuri mosque.
He then lay low for years, earning him the nickname "The Ghost" amid repeated reports he had been killed or injured as ISIS's territory shrunk.
His last voice recording to his supporters was released in August, eight months after Iraq announced it had defeated ISIS and as the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces closed in next door in Syria.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
