Turkey captures slain IS leader al-Baghdadi’s wife
Turkey has captured a wife of the slain leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday.
Erdogan made the announcement while delivering a speech in the capital of Ankara but gave no other details. He did not say when or how the woman was captured or identify her by name.
Al-Baghdadi was known to have four wives. One of his aides has said he had four wives, the maximum number he can have at one time under Islamic law.
The IS leader blew himself up during an October 26 raid by US special forces on his heavily fortified safe house in the Syrian province of Idlib.
Erdogan’s announcement comes just days after Turkish forces captured al-Baghdadi’s elder sister, identified as Rasmiya Awad, in the town of Azaz, in Aleppo province in north-western Syria.
The area is part of the region administered by Turkey after it carried out military incursions to chase away IS militants and Kurdish fighters, starting in 2016. Allied Syrian groups manage the area known as the Euphrates Shield zone.
Authorities had posted a picture of the sister. It was not immediately clear if Awad’s capture led to intelligence that allowed for the detention of the wife.
The Iraqi ex-wife, Saja al-Dulaimi, had fled from al-Baghdadi in 2009 while pregnant with his daughter. At one point, al-Baghdadi was also believed to have married to a German teenager in 2015 but she was reported to have fled a year later.
The raid that killed al-Baghdadi was a major blow to his extremist group, which has lost territories it held in Syria and Iraq in a series of military defeats by the US-led coalition and Syrian and Iraqi allies.







