People adequately conversant with English shouldn't have any difficulty understanding that sentence, although they might feel some discomfort with the multiple modification in the noun phrase "leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the caliph" (three commas in quick succession!). For intermediate-level learners of English, however, that sentence will become much easier to understand broken into two sentences as you have done, even if the simplification didn't really address the problem of the multiple modification.
At any rate, the important thing to keep in mind is to keep the sentence structure and complexity of our sentences well within the comprehension and understanding of our target readers.
As an exercise, you might want to streamline that sentence by rephrasing that uncomfortable multiple-modified noun phrase as well.