In an unusual interview from prisonone of the widows of the leader of the Islamic State group (IS) shared her version of the life they spent together. Umm Hudaifa was the first wife of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and was married to him when he was in charge of the brutal IS regime in large areas of Syria and Iraq. She now finds herself in an Iraqi prison while she is investigated for terrorism-related crimes.
In the summer of 2014, Umm Hudaifa lived with her husband in Raqqa, a former IS stronghold in Syria.
As a wanted leader of the extremist jihadist group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spent much of his time elsewhere, and on one such occasion he sent a guard to his home to pick up two of his young children.
“He told me that they were going on a trip to teach the boys how to swim,” says Umm Hudaifa.
There was a television in the house that she watched secretly. “He turned it on when he wasn’t home,” she says, explaining that he didn’t think it worked.
She says that she was isolated from the world since 2007 and that he I didn’t let him watch television or use other technology.such as mobile phones.
A few days after the guard took the children, he says he turned on the television and got “a big surprise.”
She saw her husband giving a speech at the al-Nuri Grand Mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, introducing himself for the first time as leader of the self-styled Islamic caliphate.
It was only weeks after his fighters had taken control of the region.
Images of al Baghdadi making his first appearance in years, with his long beard, wearing a black robe and demanding allegiance to Muslims, were seen around the world and marked a key moment for IS as it spread across Iraq and Syria.
Umm Hudaifa says she was shocked to learn that her children were in Mosul instead of learning to swim in the Euphrates.
He describes the scene from a crowded prison in Baghdad, Iraq’s capital, where She is detained while Iraqi authorities investigate her role in the Islamic State and the group’s crimes..
It’s a noisy place, with inmates accused of various crimes moving around the prison, including drug use and sex work, and orders for food arriving from outside.
We found a quiet space in the library and talked for almost two hours. During our conversation she projects herself as a victim who tried to escape from her husband and denies that she was involved in any of IS’s brutal activities.
That contrasts extremely with the way she is described in the legal case filed by the Yazidi women who were kidnapped and raped by IS members, who accuse her of complicity in the sexual enslavement of kidnapped girls and adults.
During the interview, he does not raise his head, not even once. He dresses in black and only reveals part of his face, up to the base of his nose..
The first years of marriage
Umm Hudaifa was born in 1976 to a conservative Iraqi family and married Ibrahim Awad al Badri, later known by his pseudonym Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, in 1999.
He had just finished his studies in sharia, or Islamic law, at the University of Baghdad and she points out that at that time her husband was “religious but not extremist… conservative, but open-minded.”
Later, in 2004, a year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces detained al-Baghdadi and held him for approximately a year in a Camp Bucca detention center.in the south of the country, along with many other men who later became senior figures in IS and other jihadist groups.
In the years after his release, she says he changed: “He became short-tempered and given to outbursts of rage.”
Others who knew al Baghdadi say he was linked to al Qaeda before his stint at Bucca, but for her, that marked a turning point after which became more and more extreme.
“He began to suffer from psychological problems,” he says. When she asked him what was happening, he told her that he “was exposed to something that ‘you can’t understand.’”
She believes, although he did not mention it explicitly, that “during his detention he was subjected to sexual torture.”
Images from another US-run prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, that were revealed that year showed prisoners forced to simulate sexual acts and adopt humiliating poses.
We raised those allegations with the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon, but have not received a response.
She says she began to wonder if he belonged to a militia group. “I used to inspect his clothes when he came home, when he was taking a shower or going to sleep,” she says.
“I even looked on his body for signs of bruises or wounds… I was perplexed,” she says, but found nothing.
“I told him then, ‘You’ve gone down the wrong path’… that made him burst into a fit of rage.”
Describe how they moved house frequently, had false identities and that her husband married a second wife.
Umm Hudaifa claims that she asked him for a divorce, but that she did not accept the conditions he imposed on her to give up her children, so she stayed by his side.
The link with the Islamic State
When Iraq descended into a bloody sectarian war that lasted from 2006 to 2008, there was no longer any doubt that he was involved with Sunni jihadist groups.
In 2010 he became the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq, a group that brought together several Iraqi jihadist organizations formed in 2006.
“We moved to rural Idlib in Syria in January 2012, and there it became completely clear to me that he was the emir [líder]”says Umm Hudaifa.
Islamic State of Iraq was one of the groups that later joined together to form the broader Islamic State two years later. declared a caliphate; an Islamist state governed according to sharia by someone considered the prophet Muhammad’s delegate on Earth.
At that moment, she describes that he He began to wear Afghan attire, grew a beard and carried a gun..
As the situation deteriorated in northwestern Syria during that country’s civil war, they moved east to the city of Raqqa, which later came to be considered the de facto capital of the IS “caliphate.”
That’s where she was living when she saw her husband on television.
The brutality of the groups that came together to form IS was already well known, but In 2014 and 2015, the atrocities became more extensive and horrific.
A UN investigative team reported that it found evidence that IS had committed genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and that the group had carried out crimes against humanity including murder, torture, kidnapping and enslavement.
Islamic State spread its atrocities on social media, including the beheadings of hostages and the incineration of a Jordanian pilot.
In another infamous incident, massacred about 1,700 Iraqi soldierspredominantly Shiites, when they returned from the Speicher military base, north of Baghdad, to their cities of origin.
Some of the women who went to live with IS now say they didn’t understand what they were getting into, so I insisted on asking Umm Hudaifa about her opinions at the time.
She claims that even then she was not able to see the photos, describing the atrocities as a “huge shock, inhumane” and that “unjustly shedding blood is a horrible thing and in that respect she had crossed the line of humanity.”
Umm Hudaifa expresses that She challenged her husband for “having the blood of those innocent people” on his hands and told her that “according to Islamic law there were other things that could be done, such as guiding them toward repentance.”
She describes how her husband used to communicate with IS leadership on his laptop.
He kept the laptop in a briefcase. “I tried to get into it to find out what was going on,” she notes, “but I was computer illiterate and it always asked me for a password.”
Mention that She tried to escape, but armed men at a checkpoint refused to let her pass and sent her back home..
As for fighting, she comments that as far as she was aware, her husband “did not participate in any combat or battle,” adding that he was in Raqqa when IS took control of Mosul; He traveled to Mosul afterwards to give her speech.
The kidnapping of Yazidi women and girls
Shortly after the speech, al-Baghdadi gave their 12-year-old daughter, Umaima, in marriage to a friend, Mansour, who was entrusted with the care of the family’s affairs.
Umm Hudaifa says she tried to stop it, but was ignored.
An Iraqi security source told us that Umaima had already been married before, at the age of 8, to a Syrian IS spokesperson..
However, he indicated that the first marriage was arranged so that the man could enter the house when al-Baghdadi was away, and that the relationship was not sexual.
Then in August 2014, Umm Hudaifa gave birth to another daughter, Nasiba, who had a congenital heart defect. That coincided with Mansour bringing nine Yazidi girls and women to the house. Her ages ranged from 9 to approximately 30 years old.
They were just one group among the thousands of Yazidi women and children enslaved by IS. Thousands more were killed.
Umm Hudaifa says she was shocked and felt “embarrassed.”
There were two young girls in the group, Samar and Zena (not their real names).
Umm Hudaifa says they only stayed in her home in Raqqa for a few days before being transferred. But then the family moved to Mosul and Samar reappeared to stay with them for about two months.
I located Samar’s father, Hamid, who tearfully recalled the moment she was taken away.
He said that he had two wives and that they, with their 26 children, two brothers and their families They were all kidnapped in the town of Khansour, in Sinjar. He escaped to the surrounding mountains.
Six of his children, including Samar, remain missing. Some returned after paying ransoms and others came home after the regions where they were being held were liberated.
The other girl. Zena is her niece and is believed to be trapped in northern Syria. Zena’s sister Soad did not know Umm Hudaifa, but she was enslaved, raped and sold seven times.
Hamid and Soad have filed a civil suit against Umm Hudaifa for collusion in the kidnapping and enslavement of Yazidi girls. They don’t believe she was a helpless victim. hey they are calling for the death penalty.
“She is responsible for everything. She was the one who selected; this one to serve her, the other one to serve her husband… and my sister was one of those girls,” says Soad.
He bases his accusations on the testimonies of other victims who have returned home.
“She is the wife of the criminal Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, and she is a criminal just like him“.
We passed the recording of our interview with Soad to Umm Hudaifa and she says: “I do not deny that my husband was a criminal,” adding that she regrets “very much what happened to them,” and denies the accusations against him.
Umm Hudaifa reveals that a little later, in January 2015, she briefly met American aid worker Kayla Mueller who was kidnapped for 18 months and died in captivity.
The circumstances surrounding Kayla’s death remain unknown; At the time, Islamic State claimed that the young woman died in a Jordanian airstrike, but the US has always rejected this version and an Iraqi security source now informs us that IS killed her.
In 2019, US forces raided the place where al-Baghdadi was hiding in northwestern Syria with part of his family.
The extremist leader detonated an explosive vest when he was cornered in a tunnelimmolating himself along with two children, while two of his four wives were shot to death in a shootout.
But Umm Hudaifa was not there. She was living in Türkiye under a false name when she was arrested in 2018.
She was sent back to Iraq in February of this year, where she is being held in prison while authorities investigate her involvement in IS.
Your oldest daughter, Umaima, is in jail with her, while Fatima, who is about 12 years old, is in a juvenile detention center.
One of his sons died in a Russian airstrike in Syria, near Homs, another died with his father in the tunnel and the youngest is in an orphanage.
As we finish our conversation, the woman raises her head and I get a brief glimpse of her entire face, but her expression gives nothing away.
As the intelligence guard takes her away, she begs to know more information about her youngest children.
Now, back in his cell, he remains waiting to know if he will face criminal charges.
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