Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council on Wednesday sentenced the unnamed wife of former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to death, nearly five years after her husband was killed in a U.S. special forces operation ordered by President Donald Trump.
An Iraqi court found Baghdadi’s wife guilty of collaborating with ISIS operations and holding Yazidi women abducted by the terrorist state as slaves in her Mosul home.
“A criminal court today sentenced Baghdadi’s wife to death by hanging for crimes against humanity, genocide against the Yazidi people and involvement in terrorist acts,” an Iraqi judicial official said. Said.
The Yazidis are a religious and ethnic minority group who live mainly in the Sinjar Mountains in Nineveh Province in northwestern Iraq. Severely abused The Islamic State raped, murdered and enslaved them with barbaric delight, and some Yazidi children were forced by ISIS to serve as soldiers.
The Yazidis Despised Viewed by some Muslims as devil-worshipping heretics, they were nearly wiped out during the rise of ISIS, and many of them remain alive almost a decade after the attempted genocide began. Living in a refugee campThe dispute also comes as Iraq’s central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) are locked in a dispute over control of Nineveh, slowing the rebuilding of the devastated Yazidi homeland.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as his nickname suggests, to be born The leader of the Baghdad region of Iraq and the self-proclaimed “caliph” of the Islamic State. His real name was Ibrahim Awwad al-Badri.
Baghdadi was a secretive figure known mainly through mythical stories spread by ISIS recruiters, but it is certainly known that he participated in terrorist resistance against the US occupation after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and was captured by US forces in 2004. How he became the political, military and religious leader of the ISIS terrorist state remains a mystery.
Baghdadi’s gruesome death in a US special forces attack has lost much of his mystique. I found him He was hiding out in Syria in October 2019.
According to Trump, Baghdadi “died like a dog” after being literally chased by dogs and forced into a tunnel while dragging his three children as a body shield. Baghdadi “sobbed and cried the whole time” before deciding to detonate his suicide vest, killing himself and his children, Trump said.
“He was a sick, corrupt man and he’s gone now. Baghdadi was a cruel and violent man. He died in a cruel and violent way, running and crying like a coward,” Trump said.
Al Jazeera News Said It said Wednesday that Baghdadi was “known to have four wives,” one of whom was detained in Turkey about a week after his death.
The BBC spoke to Iraqi Interior Ministry officials who confirmed the woman sentenced to death on Wednesday was Baghdadi’s first wife, Asma Mohammed, who also used the name Umm Hudhaifa.
Hudhayfa is arrested She was arrested in Turkey in 2018 and deported to Iraq in 2023. interview Speaking to the BBC from a Baghdad prison in June, she denied any involvement in ISIS crimes and claimed she was married to Baghdadi for years before she realised he was a terrorist. She also claimed she did not know he was the Islamic State’s “caliph” until she saw him on television announcing the creation of a terrorist state.
Hudhaifa claimed that the atrocities orchestrated by her husband came as a “great shock” to her, as she considers it “horrible to shed unjust blood.” She said she had tried to flee her home but was blocked every time by Baghdadi’s men, and that she had no idea who the kidnapped Yazidi women held captive in the house were.
The Yazidi women and their families vigorously refuted these allegations in Iraqi courts and accused Hudhayfah of being the ringleader of Baghdadi’s slave ring.
“She took all the responsibility. She made the choices: this for herself, that for her husband,” the Yazidi victim’s sister charged.
