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In a uncommon interview from jail, a widow of the Islamic State group’s chief has shared her account of their life. Umm Hudaifa was the primary spouse of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and was married to him whereas he oversaw IS’s brutal rule over massive components of Syria and Iraq. She is now being held in an Iraqi jail whereas she is investigated for terrorism-related crimes.
In the summertime of 2014, Umm Hudaifa was residing in Raqqa, IS’s then-stronghold in Syria, along with her husband.
Because the wished chief of the extremist jihadist group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi typically frolicked in different places, and on a kind of events he despatched a guard to the home to select up two of their younger sons. “He advised me they had been happening a visit to show the boys learn how to swim,” says Umm Hudaifa.
There was a tv in the home that she used to look at in secret. “I used to show it on when he wasn’t at residence,” she says, explaining he thought it didn’t work. She says she was lower off from the world and he hadn’t let her watch tv or use another know-how, resembling cellphones, since 2007.
Just a few days after the guard took the youngsters, she says she switched on the tv and received “an enormous shock”. She noticed her husband addressing the Nice Mosque of al-Nuri within the northern Iraqi metropolis of Mosul, exhibiting himself for the primary time as the top of the self-declared Islamic caliphate. It was solely weeks after his fighters had seized management of the realm.
The footage of al-Baghdadi making his first public look in years, together with his lengthy beard, wearing black robes and demanding allegiance from Muslims, was seen internationally and marked a key second for IS because it swept throughout Iraq and Syria.
Umm Hudaifa says she was shocked to seek out out her sons had been in Mosul with him moderately than studying to swim within the Euphrates.
She describes the scene from the crowded jail within the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, the place she is being held whereas Iraqi authorities examine her position in IS and the group’s crimes. It’s noisy as inmates accused of assorted crimes, together with drug use and intercourse work, are moved across the jail and meals deliveries arrive from outdoors.
We discover a quiet spot within the library and communicate for almost two hours. Throughout our dialog she paints herself as a sufferer who tried to flee from her husband and denies she was concerned in any of IS’s brutal actions.
It is a stark distinction to the way in which she is described in a courtroom case introduced by Yazidis who had been kidnapped and raped by members of IS – they accuse her of colluding within the sexual enslavement of kidnapped women and girls.
Throughout the interview, she doesn’t elevate her head, not even as soon as. She’s sporting black and solely reveals a part of her face, all the way down to the underside of her nostril.
Umm Hudaifa was born in 1976 right into a conservative Iraqi household and married Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, later identified by the pseudonym Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in 1999.
He had completed finding out Sharia, or Islamic regulation, on the College of Baghdad and he or she says on the time he was “spiritual however not extremist… conservative however open minded”.
Then in 2004, a yr after the US-led invasion of Iraq, American forces detained al-Baghdadi and held him on the detention centre at Camp Bucca within the south for a couple of yr, together with many different males who would develop into senior figures in IS and different jihadist teams.
Within the years after his launch, she claims he modified: “He turned brief tempered and given to outbursts of anger.”
Others who knew al-Baghdadi say he was concerned with al-Qaeda earlier than his time in Bucca, however for her, that marked the turning level after which he turned more and more excessive.
“He started to undergo from psychological issues,” she says. When she requested why, he advised her that “he was uncovered to one thing that ‘you can not perceive’”.
She believes that though he didn’t explicitly say so, “throughout his detention he was subjected to sexual torture”. Photos from one other US-run jail in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, that got here to gentle that yr confirmed prisoners compelled to simulate sexual acts and undertake humiliating poses.
We put her allegation to the US Division of Protection, the Pentagon, however haven’t acquired a response.
She says she began to marvel if he belonged to a militant group. “I used to look his garments when he got here again residence, when he was having a shower or when he went to sleep.
“I’d even search his physique for bruises or accidents… I used to be perplexed,” she says, however she didn’t discover something.
“I advised him again then, ‘You’ve gone astray’… it drove him right into a raging match.”
She describes how they typically moved home, had faux identities and her husband married a second spouse. Umm Hudaifa says she requested for a divorce however she wouldn’t comply with his situation that she quit their youngsters, so she stayed with him.
As Iraq fell into bloody sectarian warfare that lasted from 2006 to 2008, she now not had any doubt that he was concerned in Sunni jihadist teams. In 2010 he turned the chief of the Islamic State of Iraq – shaped in 2006 this was an umbrella group of Iraqi jihadi organisations.
“We moved to the Idlib countryside in Syria in January 2012, and there it turned completely clear to me that he was the emir [leader],” Umm Hudaifa says.
The Islamic State of Iraq was one of many teams that later joined forces to type the broader Islamic State group that declared a caliphate – an Islamic state ruled in accordance with Sharia by somebody thought of God’s deputy on Earth – two years later.
At the moment, she says he began to put on Afghani costume, grew a beard, and carried a pistol.
Because the safety scenario deteriorated in north-west Syria through the nation’s civil warfare, they moved east to town of Raqqa, which later got here to be thought of the de facto capital of the IS “caliphate”. That is the place she was residing when she noticed her husband on tv.
The brutality of the teams that got here collectively to type IS was already well-known however in 2014 and 2015, the atrocities turned extra widespread and extra horrific.
A UN investigative crew reported that it had discovered proof that IS dedicated genocide in opposition to Iraq’s Yazidi minority and that the group had carried out crimes in opposition to humanity together with homicide, torture, kidnapping, and enslavement.
IS broadcast its atrocities, together with the beheading of hostages and the burning of a Jordanian pilot, on social media.
In one other infamous incident, it massacred about 1,700 predominantly Shia trainee Iraqi soldiers as they returned from the Speicher military base north of Baghdad to their residence cities.
Some ladies who went to stay with IS now say they didn’t perceive what they had been moving into so I pressed Umm Hudaifa on her views on the time – she says even then she couldn’t take a look at the images, describing the atrocities as a “large shock, inhumane” and “to spill blood unjustly is a horrendous factor and in that regard they crossed the road of humanity”.
Umm Hudaifa says she challenged her husband about having “the blood of these harmless folks” on his palms and advised him that “in keeping with Islamic regulation there are different issues that would have been carried out, like guiding them in direction of repentance”.
She describes how her husband used to speak with IS’s leaders on his laptop computer.
He stored the pc locked in a briefcase. “I attempted to interrupt into it to seek out out what was taking place,” she says, “however I used to be technologically illiterate and it all the time requested me for a passcode.”
She says she tried to flee, however armed males at a checkpoint refused to let her cross and despatched her again to the home.
As for preventing, she says of her husband that so far as she knew “he didn’t participate in any combat or battle”, including that he was in Raqqa when IS took management of Mosul – he travelled to Mosul later to offer his speech.
Quickly after that sermon, al-Baghdadi married their 12-year-old daughter, Umaima, to a pal, Mansour, who was entrusted with taking good care of the household’s affairs. Umm Hudaifa says she tried to stop it, however she was ignored.
An Iraqi safety supply advised us that Umaima had already been married as soon as earlier than, on the age of eight, to a Syrian IS spokesman. Nevertheless, he mentioned the primary marriage was organized in order that the person may go into the home when al-Baghdadi was away, and that relationship was not sexual.
Then in August 2014, Umm Hudaifa gave start to a different daughter, Nasiba, who had a congenital coronary heart defect. This coincided with Mansour bringing 9 Yazidi women and girls to the home. Their ages ranged from 9 to about 30.
They had been only a handful of hundreds of Yazidi ladies and kids enslaved by IS – hundreds extra had been killed.
Umm Hudaifa says she was shocked and “felt ashamed”.
There have been two younger women within the group, Samar and Zena – not their actual names. Umm Hudaifa claims they solely stayed in her home in Raqqa for a couple of days earlier than they had been moved. However later the household moved to Mosul and Samar reappeared, staying with them for about two months.
I tracked down Samar’s father, Hamid, who tearfully recalled the second she was taken.
He mentioned he had two wives and that they, alongside together with his 26 youngsters, two brothers and their households had been all kidnapped from the city of Khansour in Sinjar. He escaped into the close by mountains.
Six of his youngsters, together with Samar are nonetheless lacking. Some returned after ransoms had been paid and others got here residence after the areas the place they had been held had been liberated.
The opposite woman, Zena, is his niece and is considered caught in northern Syria. Zena’s sister, Soad, didn’t meet Umm Hudaifa herself, however was enslaved, raped and offered seven instances.
Hamid and Soad have filed a civil lawsuit in opposition to Umm Hudaifa for colluding within the kidnapping and enslavement of Yazidi women. They don’t consider she was a helpless sufferer and are calling for the demise penalty.
“She was liable for all the things. She made the choices – this one to serve her, that one to serve her husband… and my sister was a kind of women,” says Soad. She has based mostly this on the testimonies of different victims who’ve returned residence.
“She is the spouse of the felony Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and he or she is a felony similar to him.”
We play Umm Hudaifa the recording of our interview with Soad and he or she says: “I don’t deny that my husband was a felony,” however provides she is “very sorry for what occurred to them”, and denies the accusations directed at her.
Umm Hudaifa says that a little bit later, in January 2015, she briefly met the kidnapped US help employee, Kayla Mueller, who was held hostage for 18 months and died in captivity.
The circumstances round Kayla’s demise are nonetheless not identified – on the time IS claimed she was killed by a Jordanian air strike, however the US all the time disputed this and an Iraqi safety supply has now advised us she was killed by IS.
In 2019, US forces raided the place the place al-Baghdadi and was hiding in north-west Syria with a few of his household. Baghdadi detonated an explosive vest when cornered in a tunnel, killing himself and two youngsters, whereas two of his 4 wives had been killed in a shootout.
Umm Hudaifa was not there nonetheless – she had been residing in Turkey beneath a false title the place she was arrested in 2018. She was despatched again to Iraq in February this yr, the place she has since been stored in jail whereas authorities examine her position in IS.
Her eldest daughter Umaima is in jail along with her, whereas Fatima who’s about 12 is in a youth detention centre. Considered one of her sons was killed in a Russian air strike in Syria close to Homs, one other died together with his father within the tunnel and the youngest boy is in an orphanage.
Once we end speaking, she raises her head and I briefly catch a glimpse of her full face, however her expression provides nothing away. Because the intelligence officer leads her away, she pleads for extra details about her youngest youngsters. And now, again in her cell, she should wait to seek out out if she is going to face felony fees.
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