Widow of ISIS leader sentenced to death by Baghdad court

The widow of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi has been sentenced to death by a court in Baghdad.

She was found guilty by Al Karkh Criminal Court of “working with terrorist Daesh gangs”, Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council said on Wednesday, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.

While it did not name her, a court official told The National her name is Asma Fawzi Mohammad, known as Umm Hudaifa.

It said she detained Yazidi women in her home and then had them abducted by ISIS extremists in Sinjar district, west of Ninevah province.

For centuries, the Yazidis – who follow an ancient monotheistic religion, but are falsely seen by some as devil-worshippers – lived in the mountains in north-west Iraq where their ancestral villages, temples and shrines are located.

In August 2014, ISIS fanatics captured Sinjar and surrounding villages, taking thousands of Yazidis captive and slaughtering others. Thousands of young women were forced into sexual slavery by the militants while mass graves containing the bodies of thousands killed are still being uncovered.

Others escaped to nearby Mount Sinjar, where many were flown to safety by the US-backed Iraqi forces. Some embarked on a difficult journey barefoot to Syria and then to Iraq.

Al Baghdadi was the self-styled caliph of the extremist group, which overran large areas of Iraq and Syria starting in 2014.

He had a $25 million bounty on his head and was pursued by the US and its allies.

The ISIS chief blew himself up during a 2019 raid by American special forces in north-western Syria, Donald Trump, US president at the time, announced.

Born in 1976 into a conservative Iraqi family, Umm Hudaifa married Al Baghdadi in 1999, she told BBC in an interview aired in May. His real name is Ibrahim Awad Al Badri.

At the time, he was “religious but not extremist … conservative but open-minded” when finished studying Sharia, or Islamic law, at the University of Baghdad, she said.

When the group declared its “caliphate” in areas it controlled in Iraq and Syria, she was in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which later came to be considered its de facto capital.

She was arrested in 2018 in Turkey, a year after declaring the terrorists defeated in Iraq, and sent back to Iraq in February this year, she said.

The widow then faced a case brought by a Yazidi family, accusing her of colluding in the sexual enslavement of kidnapped girls and women.

During the interview, she acknowledged that her son-in-law brought in August 2014 nine Yazidi girls and women to the house. Their ages ranged from nine to about 30.

Two of them stayed in her house in Raqqa for a few days before they were moved, she claimed. But later the family moved to Mosul and another one reappeared, staying with them for about two months, she added.

She denied that she was involved in any of ISIS’s brutal activities.

At its peak, ISIS-controlled territory stretching from western Syria to eastern Iraq and imposed its brutal rule on about eight million people.

The extremist group generated billions of dollars in revenue from oil, extortion and kidnapping.

ISIS still poses a security challenge in Iraq and Syria where its extremists still launch sporadic attacks.