When thinking of the leader of the Islamic State (IS), most will think of Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) ascending the minbar to give the Friday khutba at Nuri Mosque in Mosul on 4 July 2014, days after IS had declared the territories it controlled in Iraq and Syria to be a “caliphate”. The image sticks in mind despite Al-Badri having been killed five years ago this month—on 27 October 2019, to be precise—in a U.S. raid in northern Syria, and the perishing of three of his successors since then. The current IS “caliph”, Abu Hafs al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi, was appointed in August 2023, and by lasting fourteen months has reigned longer than his two immediate predecessors combined. The state of “the State” is an issue for another time, though. The focus today is recent developments related to Al-Badri first wife, Asma Fawzi Mohammed al-Qubaysi (Umm Hudayfa).
THE FIRST WIVES CLUB
IS has given us parts of Al-Badri’s biography, and it is possible to piece together a broad outline. Still, whole areas remain shrouded in mystery, his marital arrangements among them.
During that extraordinary press conference then-President Donald Trump gave to announce Al-Badri’s demise—the “he died like a dog” one1—Trump said two of Al-Badri’s wives were killed with him in the U.S. raid because they were wearing explosive vests.2 This seems to be true (see below). There were five additional fatalities that night: two other women and another man who refused to leave the compound, and two children whom Al-Badri murdered when he retreated to a tunnel with them and blew himself up.3
Then there is the strange case of Saja al-Dulaimi, who came to public attention in July 2014 after pictures of her and her two children went viral. The pictures were reportedly from March 2014, when Al-Dulaimi was among those released by Bashar al-Asad’s regime as part of a swap with Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra, which had kidnapped thirteen Greek Orthodox Christian nuns from Malula, near Damascus, one of three villages that speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
The information uncovered at that time suggested Al-Dulaimi’s family had been deeply involved with IS for a decade.4 It was odd that Al-Nusra, which had broken from IS a year earlier, should have apparently made the deal over the nuns hostage to Al-Dulaimi’s release, and when Al-Dulaimi was next heard from—being arrested in Lebanon in December 2014, alongside her Palestinian husband Kamal Khalaf—the questions only mounted. Almost exactly a year later, Al-Dulaimi was released in another “prisoner exchange” with Al-Nusra, this one for sixteen men from the Lebanese security forces.
Al-Dulaimi would subsequently claim she had been married to Al-Badri for three months in 2008 without ever knowing he was part of the Islamic State movement, and the Lebanese government, such as it is, said the same thing—but there are serious problems with both accounts.5 The Iraqi government bluntly dismissed Al-Dulaimi’s claim to have ever been Al-Badri’s wife. On its own, this means absolutely nothing, but for once there were independent reasons to think Baghdad was on to something.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry, citing its own intelligence services, which are not always completely hopeless in such matters, said Al-Badri had only ever had two legal wives: Isra Rajab Mahal al-Qaysi and Asma Mohammed. It might well be that Al-Qaysi’s story ended with Al-Badri’s. Asma Mohammed’s did not.
ASMA MOHAMMED REAPPEARS
Asma Mohammed was a little younger than Al-Badri—she was born in 1976; he in 1971—when they married in 1999, right around the time Al-Badri was finishing his master’s in Qur’anic recitation and getting involved in the Islamist scene that was festering in Saddam Husayn’s Iraq. Al-Badri enrolled swiftly in a Qur’anic studies doctoral program and received his PhD in 2007: somewhere in this period, he married Isra.
Turkey’s ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced on 6 November 2019 that Asma Mohammed had been “captured” by Turkish forces, along with Al-Badri’s “sister and brother-in-law in Syria”. Turkish officials speaking to Reuters said Asma Mohammed had been rounded up as part of an IS cell inside Turkey, in Hatay, on 2 June 2018. (It was just over a month after this that it was announced Hudayfa al-Badri, the 18-year-old son of the caliph and Asma Mohammed, their first child, had been killed in an inghimasi operation against the pro-Asad coalition.)
Asma Mohammed’s extradition from Turkey to Iraq was revealed by Baghdad on 15 February 2024, without any further details. The same day, an hour-long interview Al-Arabiya was allowed to do with Asma Mohammed while in Iraqi custody was aired.6 The airing of this interview might seem strange, but in the Iraqi context it is not.
Since shortly before Iraq’s first free election in January 2005, Al-Iraqiya has aired a program, Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, featuring captured jihadists—many of them foreign, often confronting them with atrocity footage they have filmed and/or the families of victims—with the aim of demystifying and discrediting the (Sunni) insurgency.7 The possibility—likelihood—that “confessions” are coerced or staged has always hung over the enterprise, not least because of the involvement of the viciously sectarian Shi’a “Wolf Brigade” commando unit in the production of the show in its early days, and that problem is far worse since Iraq degenerated wholesale into an Iranian-dominated Militia State. The show obviously also runs roughshod over legal protections against self-incrimination,8 and is in some tension with the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition on broadcasting “images of prisoners in humiliating or degrading situations”. The Iraqi defence of the practice is, basically, that the jihadists are already outside the law—the Geneva Conventions apply to soldiers, not hostis humani generis (the enemies of all mankind)—and the practical utility of such political warfare to a State fighting for its life outweighs the legal niceties.
Asma Mohammed tells Al-Arabiya that Al-Badri was “a normal person who did not have extremist thoughts” when she married him, and it was only after the was arrested by the Americans in February 2004—“for no reason”, in her telling—and released in December 2004 that she began to notice changes.9 “He was not the same man I lived with before,” she said.
Asma Mohammed says that Al-Badri kept more than ten Yazidi women as sex slaves.10 She says Al-Badri and IS became “obsessed” with women and “turned the Islamic State into a ‘State of Women’.” The IS jihadists were “driven by their desires in a way that exceeded the limits of humanity”, Asma Mohammed says, her husband included. Al-Badri “indulged” himself by “marrying” a fourteen-year-old Iraqi named Nour, a girl the same age as his daughters. Nour is the daughter of Abu Abdallah al-Zuba’i, then-a close aid to the caliph, handling his travel, correspondence, and security.
As well as the Iraqi child bride, Isra, and herself, Asma Mohammed claims Al-Badri “married” two other women: a Syrian from Aleppo, Aisha Qatmawi, before the caliphate declaration—a women with whom he supposedly had five children—and a Chechen woman in July 2015. (It has been suggested Qatmawi was the second wife—assuming the other was Isra—who was killed with Al-Badri in 2019. There is no indication what happened to the Chechen.)
In Raqqa, Al-Badri married one of his own daughters, Umaima, 12, to a jihadist friend, Mansour, 23, who was responsible for looking after the caliph’s family, according to Asma Mohammed.
The U.S. raid that killed Al-Badri was named Operation KAYLA MUELLER in honour of the Arizona human rights activist and aid worker kidnapped by IS in Syria in August 2013 and murdered in February 2015. Kayla Mueller was held at first by the British “Beatles” unit of IS, but was reported to have “belonged” to Al-Badri by the time of her death, and to have been raped many times by him.11 Asma Mohammed confirms that she knew Mueller was one of Al-Badri’s sex slaves, albeit while claiming to have met Mueller only once personally. While disclaiming any concrete knowledge, Asma Mohammed joins all reasonable people in disbelieving IS’s story that Mueller was killed in a Jordanian airstrike.
Speaking of her own views, Asma Mohammed says slavery is in the Qur’an and “this was normal at a certain point in time”, but she feels that time has passed and “slavery has become unacceptable for any human being”. Asked if Al-Badri had ever requested she take part in a suicide bombing, Asma Mohammed says she was asked to wear a suicide belt, but refused: “God prohibited suicide” and she could not endanger her children like that. She says she is upset that Al-Badri killed one of her sons at the end.
THE PROBLEMS WITH ASMA MOHAMMED’S TESTIMONY
Asma Mohammed’s claim that Al-Badri was not an extremist before U.S. troops arrested him in 2004 is simply untrue in every way. Al-Badri became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood no later than 1999 and quickly gravitated to its most extreme wing, before joining the well-developed Salafi Trend in Iraq around 2000 and once again aligned with the most confrontational current. Al-Badri was a jihadi-Salafist long before the Saddam regime came down in April 2003, and his actions in the aftermath reflect that.
The Saddamists and Sunni revanchists looking for the most effective route to overturning the new order in Iraq had a vast array of powerful Ba’thi-Islamist groups to join, staffed by the skilled security and intelligence personnel of the fallen regime and lavishly funded with its looted treasury. Al-Badri spurned these groups and in mid-2003 was among the founders of Jaysh Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jamaa, a marginal militant Salafi insurgent group that was “very close” to Jamaat Tawhid wal-Jihad, IS’s predecessor, which was at that point a small, foreign-led jihadist network.12 It was for jihadist activity that Al-Badri was imprisoned by the Americans.
The details Asma Mohammed provides about IS’s treatment of women are plausible. Her broader argument that this was the real motivation of the caliphate’s leaders is contradicted by her own account. “All [Al-Badri] cared about was conquests …, how they can expand Al-Dawla (the State) … They had dreams of conquering Rome”, Asma Mohammed said. Likewise, one can believe Al-Badri “became arrogant”, but it seems most unlikely—as Asma Mohammed claims—that this involved him believing the Islamic State would receive international recognition, or that he would ever have wanted such an outcome.
Another contradiction in Asma Mohammed’s testimony—one crucial to her legal predicament—occurs when discussing whether Yazidi sex slaves were ever kept in her house. “None of the Yazidi women stayed with me”, Asma Mohammed says, but then immediately adds: “Maybe [they did] just for two to three days, or maybe a week. The most any one of them stayed with was maybe two months. Her name is Riham. She was a child and stayed with my children. With regard to the rest of the Yazidi women, I did not know where he was taking them, or what he was doing with them.” Except, as documented above, it seems she knew very well. And there are indications the reality was much worse.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the interview with Al-Arabiya is when Asma Mohammed is asked about Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani), the IS spokesman from 2011 to 2016, a man intimately involved in the foreign terrorism campaign and a powerful administrator within the caliphate when he was killed.13 The interviewer wants to know if Falaha received a Yazidi sex slave from Al-Badri and Asma Mohammed says she does not know, though “all the emirs owned Yazidi women”. When pressed on whether she ever met Falaha or spoke to him, she clams up, saying cryptically: “This issue is very sensitive for me and for my children.”
Siban Khalil, a Yazidi woman once held as a sex slave by IS, came forward days after the Al-Arabiya interview went out to state that she knew Asma Mohammed was lying about her relationship with Falaha and the extent of her complicity in the Yazidis’ enslavement.
First, Khalil says Falaha had been her “owner” and had left Khalil in his will to Asma Mohammed, who was instructed to treat Khalil “well” and never allow her to return to her family. In itself this is suggestive that Asma Mohammed knew Falaha rather better than she let on. But Khalil says she was “shocked” by Asma Mohammed’s attempt to distance herself from Falaha, since Falaha personally told Khalil that Al-Badri’s household was his “second family” and Falaha had been in and around Al-Badri and his wife for years.
Second, while Khalil cannot comment on whether Al-Badri ever gave Yazidi slaves to Falaha, Khalil says Al-Badri certainly received a Yazidi slave from Falaha, i.e. herself, and Asma Mohammed was not only present for the whole time Khalil was imprisoned in Al-Badri’s house. Asma Mohammed was the day-to-day controller of Khalil’s life.
According to Khalil, she was kept in Al-Badri’s house for six months after Falaha was killed on 30 August 2016—far longer than the few days or few weeks or two months that Asma Mohammed admits Yazidi slaves were kept in her home. Khalil says that Asma Mohammed initially treated her as well as anyone can treat somebody they are treating as property: Khalil was made to do housework and take care of Al-Badri’s children, but was not physically harmed. This changed, Khalil says, after Asma Mohammed discovered that Khalil had been keeping a notebook with details about IS and its leaders. Al-Badri beat Khalil for this, and afterwards Asma Mohammed intermittently asked Al-Badri to beat Khalil, which he did. “Sometimes I was beaten by her and her husband at the same time”, Khalil says.
Khalil was furious with Asma Mohammed’s attempts to portray herself as a victim, saying Asma Mohammed had been a loyal wife to the caliph, was known as “the Mother of the Believers” (Umm al-Mu’mineen) within IS for her dedication to the cause, and had no objection to her underage daughter being given as a “wife” to an adult IS jihadist. Khalil goes on to say that the young Yazidi girl, Riham, whom Asma Mohammed claimed to treat as one of her own children, was seven-years-old and only stayed at Al-Badri’s house for one month because Asma Mohammed “sold her to one of her relatives”.
Khalil concluded by stating her belief that Asma Mohammed’s strongest condemnation of the Islamic State—“the Daesh organisation is a black [stain on] history and it is over”—was actually “a veiled message to the [IS] sleeper cells to continue [the jihad]”.
THE SECOND INTERVIEW
The BBC was granted an interview with Asma Mohammed four months later, which was published on 10 June.
Feras Kilani, the BBC journalist who spoke with Asma Mohammed, describes the scene this way:
[Asma Mohammed is in a] crowded prison in … Baghdad … It’s noisy as inmates accused of various crimes, including drug use and sex work, are moved around the prison and food deliveries arrive from outside. We find a quiet spot in the library and speak for nearly two hours. … Her eldest daughter Umaima is in prison with her, while Fatima who is about 12 is in a youth detention centre. One of her sons was killed in a Russian air strike in Syria near Homs, another died with his father in the tunnel, and the youngest boy is in an orphanage.
In this second interview, Asma Mohammed plays up the notion that she was an innocent bystander to what her husband did—and even that she opposed him as far as she was able.
For example, Asma Mohammed claims that Al-Badri had cut her off from the outside world in 2007, banning her from watching television or having any electronic devices, especially a mobile telephone. But, says, Asma Mohammed, once she had been moved to Raqqa in 2013, she would sneak the television on when Al-Badri was out of the house. Apparently a television remained in the home because she had convinced Al-Badri it did not work.
It was during one of these covert TV-watching sessions that Asma Mohammed says she learned of the caliphate declaration, and the location of her sons. Al-Badri often moved around for security reasons and was, therefore, rarely home. At some point in June 2014, Al-Badri sent a messenger to the house to pick up his two young sons. “He told me they were going on a trip to teach the boys how to swim”, Asma Mohammed tells the BBC, and she assumed this meant taking them to the Euphrates just south of Raqqa city. So it was a “huge surprise” when she turned the box on to see Al-Badri, in Abbasid reenactment get-up, showing his face to the world for the first time in Mosul and proclaiming himself leader of the entire umma (Muslim community).
Asma Mohammed continues with her storyline that Al-Badri was “religious but not extremist … conservative but open minded” before he was imprisoned by the U.S. in 2004, and only after that experience did he turn to jihadism. Again, this is false and Asma Mohammed certainly knows that. But there is more to it in the BBC interview: what is said here suggests that Siban Khalil is correct when she says that Asma Mohammed is trying to further IS’s cause even now.
Al-Badri “began to suffer from psychological problems” after Camp Bucca, Asma Mohammed says, and she says that when she asked him what was wrong, he told her that “he was exposed to something that ‘you cannot understand’.” She tells the BBC that he tacitly communicated that “during his detention he was subjected to sexual torture”. This is not true, but it does play into an IS propaganda theme, wherein its savagery is a reactive or defensive measure against American cruelty to Muslims. The unspoken reference is to the recreational sadism of a small group of U.S. military police at the prison in Abu Ghraib. It was an isolated incident, halted and under investigation months before it became public in April 2004, where the perpetrators were all punished, as were those with command responsibility. Nonetheless, “Abu Ghraib” has been an anti-American talking-point for two decades, and has been invoked by the Islamic State for a number of its atrocities, starting with the first wave of video beheadings of Western hostages in 2004.
Asma Mohammed presumably thought it was exculpatory to claim to the BBC that she was unsure Al-Badri was involved in the Iraqi insurgency until 2006. In reality, it emphasises her mendacity. By her own account, after being released from prison in December 2004, her husband forced them to constantly move house and carried multiple fake identity documents. Nobody in Iraq at that time was “perplexed” by what this meant.
Asma Mohammed does confirm—and we have no reason to disbelieve her on this point—that it was in the 2005-06 period that Al-Badri married his second wife, Isra. Asma Mohammed’s claim that she tried to leave Al-Badri once Isra arrived because of her concerns about his militant activity, and was thwarted by him agreeing to a divorce only on condition he got to keep the children, is to be regarded with much more scepticism.
The penny dropped that her husband was a terrorist in 2006-08, according to Asma Mohammed, though she continues to ask us to believe she was possessed of a naivete unbecoming in a child. Al-Badri became the leader of the IS movement in May 2010. Asma Mohammed claims to have been unaware of this for two years: “We moved to the Idlib countryside in Syria in January 2012, and there it became absolutely clear to me that he was the emir”. Perhaps someone will even believe that Al-Badri beginning to wear Afghan-style clothing was the giveaway.
If there is anything to be taken from this, it is the detail that Al-Badri was in Syria so early.14 IS operated in Syria through a front group, Jabhat al-Nusra, from mid-2011, and it is known that other senior IS officials moved into Syria soon afterwards to manage the project. Al-Badri being personally present in Syria at this stage is a novel claim, as far as I know.
Al-Badri had been in (eastern) Syria around 2005 as an IS facilitator, working on the “ratlines” overseen by the Asad regime that brought the foreign fighters and suicide bombers into Iraq. But in the Syrian civil war period, Al-Badri’s first journey to Syria is usually dated to the spring of 2013, at the end of the experiment with Al-Nusra: Al-Badri was trying to bring Al-Nusra to heel in advance of the April 2013 declaration of IS’s ownership of Al-Nusra, which turned out to be the spark for the irreparable schism between IS and Al-Qaeda ten months later. If Asma Mohammed is telling the truth and Al-Badri was in north-west Syria in January 2012, it suggests he was there at the beginning of the experiment with Al-Nusra, too: the group publicly announced its existence that month.
Al-Badri being present in Idlib at the outset of IS’s intrusion into Syria would also add something of a harbinger to his life history: it was there, seven-and-a-half years later, he met his downfall. And beyond narrative symmetry, it would highlight the deep roots IS has in the area.
Raqqa fell to Syrian rebels in March 2013, and ISIS (as the group was then-named) became dominant in the city by August-September 2013, ushering in the kind of regime that would later become so globally infamous. The rebel offensive in north-western Syria in January 2014 pushed ISIS out of a significant swathe of territory, including Idlib (or so it seemed), but ISIS consolidated a defensive line east of Aleppo and thoroughly purged the areas it overtly controlled of independent actors. Piecing together what Asma Mohammed says, Al-Badri moved his family to Raqqa before the Syrian rebellion went to war with ISIS, probably in the summer of 2013.
Asma Mohammed would have us believe that she was horrified by what she saw around her, the floggings and public “executions”, and the worse crimes to come: the genocidal massacre of Iraqi Shi’a cadets at Camp Speicher in June 2014 as IS swept across central Iraq towards Baghdad, the onset of the genocide of the Yazidis in August 2014, the beheading on video of James Foley later that month and the similar snuff videos that followed showing the fate of the other Western hostages, the January 2015 burning alive of the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh, the wave of terrorism around the world, and on and on.
Seeing the pictures and videos of this carry-on was a “huge shock” Asma Mohammed, who seems to have spent much of the quarter-century in a state of surprise. “To spill blood unjustly is a horrendous thing and in that regard they crossed the line of humanity”, she goes on. Asma Mohammed tells the BBC she challenged Al-Badri about having “the blood of those innocent people” on his hands. The effect of this apparent moral outrage is rather undone when she adds that she told him: “according to Islamic law there are other things that could have been done, like guiding them towards repentance”. In other words, Asma Mohammed accepted the caliph’s premise that Shi’is and Yazidis were in the wrong; she just had qualms about his correctional methods.
Next up, we get claims that Asma Mohammed tried to access the laptop the caliph used to communicate with his commanders. If there was an intent to sabotage or subvert IS, she does not say so. It seems to have just been curiosity: “I tried to break into it to find out what was happening, but I was technologically illiterate and it always asked me for a passcode.”
Theoretically reflecting more positively on Asma Mohammed, in 2014 she says she made a second attempt to leave Al-Badri, but was prevented from doing so by IS jihadists at a checkpoint who sent her home. We only have Asma Mohammed’s word for this, though, a most debased currency.
At the end of the interview, Asma Mohammed repeats the earlier claims that she opposed her young daughter being married to Mansour, that she only met Kayla Mueller once (in January 2015, she now specifies), and that she was “ashamed” Yazidi slaves were brought into her home but they only stayed there for a few days.
Two liberated Yazidi women had by this point filed a lawsuit against Asma Mohammed. “She was responsible for everything. She made the selections—this one to serve her, that one to serve her husband … and my sister was one of those girls”, said one of the Yazidi women. “She is the wife of the criminal Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and she is a criminal just like him.” Responding to the allegations, Asma Mohammed said, “I don’t deny that my husband was a criminal,” and she is “very sorry for what happened to them [the enslaved Yazidis]”, but denies all accusations against her.
IRAQI JUSTICE
It was not just Yazidi survivors agitating against leniency for Asma Mohammed. From the Iraqi parliament on down, nobody believed in her innocence. The Iraqi courts did not take long to render their verdict. On 10 July, Asma Mohammed was sentenced to death for “working with the extremist organisation and detaining Yazidi women”, as the Supreme Judicial Council put it. Asma Mohammed’s daughter, Umaima, and Nour Ibrahim al-Zuba’i (Al-Badri’s Iraqi child bride in 2014) were given life sentences.
The Iranian-dominated Iraqi government has been notoriously unscrupulous in its anti-IS campaign. It was under the cover of that campaign that Iran’s Islamic Revolution in Iraq moved into its final phase. Al-Hashd al-Shabi, an apparent volunteer force supposedly called up in response to the ISIS crisis, was part of an older design of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and became the vehicle for Iran’s decisive conquest of Iraq—with American help. Neither the fact that the IRGC “Special Groups” dominating the Hashd had murdered hundreds of U.S. soldiers just a few years earlier, nor the Hashd’s atrocious conduct against Sunni civilians in areas it captured from IS had the U.S. reconsider providing close-air support to the Hashd. The U.S. facilitated the Hashd’s physical control over much of Iraq and its acquisition of enough political prestige as the “saviour” of the country that it was legally incorporated into the Iraqi State in 2016. From that foothold, Iran has extinguished the final embers of Iraqi sovereignty. This indiscriminate sectarianism of the IRGC/Hashd troops, to say nothing of their role as an extension of Iran’s clerical government, should temper any temptation to sympathise with their take-no-prisoners approach in Mosul and elsewhere.
Since the end of the war, the “battlefield execution” type killings might have stopped, but the “disappearances” carried out by men in official uniforms have continued and hundreds of people have been hanged for crimes against humanity and other offences they allegedly committed as part of IS. We can never know how many were truly guilty of the charges because legal “procedures” in Iraq are basically non-existent. Torture to extract confessions is the least of it. Even on paper, the broad anti-terrorism law, the “standards” of evidence, and the mass trials that would confound an honest judge leave defendants little chance of acquittal. Under these conditions, the thousands “only” imprisoned are the lucky ones.
For all that, it is difficult to get too indignant that Asma Mohammed will be sent to the gallows. There will be objections from the jihadists and a wider overlapping circles of sympathisers and Sunni sectarians, from principled opponents of capital punishment, from anyone credulous enough to believe her claims of innocence, and from those whose ideologised vision of the world outstrips any connection to reality, namely the “human rights” groups and libertarians. Rough justice this might be, it is still more justice than the jihadist project Asma Mohammed supported allowed those who fell into its hands.
Final point. Asma Mohammed is in some ways an unusual case. Not many wives of senior IS officials have been captured. The only one that springs instantly to mind is Seda Dudarkaeva.15 In other ways, however, Asma Mohammed is paradigmatic. Al-Hol camp in Syria, run by the PKK, warehouses the wives and children of IS jihadists. It is a seething nightmare of indoctrination, violence, and terrorist fundraising by women who remain as fully jihadized now as when they were beating their Yazidi slaves and applauding the public beheadings. Words like “rehabilitation” and “reintegration” are sick jokes when used about such a place. The Europeans hiding behind obfuscatory legalism to avoid taking back their citizens from Al-Hol—who number many thousands—might be irritating hypocrisy, but one can hardly blame them. There is no end in sight at Al-Hol; no “solution” and “management” is a relative term for the current conditions. IS has staged breakouts at other Syrian prisons; the lack of an attempt on Al-Hol probably has more to do with the camp’s advantages to IS as-is, rather than any lack of ability. The Iraqi approach is grotesque, but all judgment is comparative and the realistic alternatives are not pretty either.
Post has been updated
NOTES
My own favourite section of that presser remains the perfectly surreal moment when the President of the United States and Leader of the Free World announced: “[The American soldiers] did a lot of shooting, and they did a lot of blasting, even not going through the front door. You know, you would think you go through the door. If you’re a normal person, you say, ‘Knock, knock. May I come in?’” If you have not seen the cut comparison with President Barack Obama’s announcement of Usama bin Laden’s death, do make haste to view it.
Trump, during the press conference, when asked about the reporting that two of Al-Badri’s wives had been killed, initially said, “there were two women” [italics added], but did subsequently use the word “wives” twice. Trump is notoriously slipshod in his use of language, so what he knew and what he meant to say are anybody’s guess. Days later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did state more clearly that two of Al-Badri’s wives had died with him, but no names or explanation of how this was known were provided.
There were others at the compound, including eleven children. They obeyed U.S. instructions to come out of the compound before the raid began, were kept out of harm’s way, and the non-combatants were released.
Saja al-Dulaimi’s father, Ibrahim al-Dulaimi, had reportedly been part of the Islamic State movement during the time when it was still ruled by the founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, the infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which is to say before 2006. The father had risen to become an IS emir in Syria and been killed fighting the pro-Asad coalition at Deir Atiyah, near the Lebanese border north of Damascus. A sister had been involved in terrorism in Iraq. Making the point about Saja personally, Al-Badri was said to be her second husband. Her first, Fallah Ismail Jassem, had been a member of Jaysh al-Rashideen, one of the Ba’thi-Salafist units that emerged out of the insurgent infrastructure created by the Saddam Husayn regime, which was staffed by its Islamized remnants and had been drawn into the IS movement’s orbit.
After release in December 2015, Al-Dulaimi told Al-Jazeera, which had free access in the Al-Qaeda/Al-Nusra-controlled areas of Syria (obviously): “They say that I was the wife of Al-Baghdadi. I don’t know, we have been divorced for six or seven years.” Al-Dulaimi expressed a desire to move to Turkey.
In a March 2016 interview with the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Al-Dulaimi claimed she was married to Al-Badri for three months in 2008, at which time she knew him as “Hisham Mohammad”, a lecturer on the shari’a at the Islamic University of Baghdad. Al-Dulaimi concedes that “Hisham” would “sometimes disappear” for days at a time, but she “didn’t notice” any signs he was part of the insurgency, and she last saw him in 2009. (Al-Dulaimi also told Expressen she now wanted to move to the West: “I was the one who left him … If I wanted to live with Al-Baghdadi, I could have lived like a princess. I don’t want money. I want to live in freedom.”)
Al-Dulaimi’s timeline for the marriage at least tallies with what the Lebanese Interior Minister, Nohad Machnouk, said at the end of 2014. But the credibility of both is suspect. The name Al-Dulaimi gives for Al-Badri is not an alias he has ever been known to have used, and there is simply no way she would not have known Al-Badri was part of the insurgency at that time: he was rising through the ranks of the IS movement and she had already had one terrorist husband; nobody is that naïve. Machnouk’s claim that Al-Dulaimi was the daughter of a then-active member of Al-Nusra contradicts the earlier reporting that her father was an IS emir killed in Syria in 2013. While a motive for Al-Dulaimi to be deceptive is less clear, Machnouk is the servant of a State occupied by the Iranian Revolution and the systemic issue of such governments using false terrorism charges against Sunnis is well-known.
The airing of “confessions” from captured jihadists on Iraqi television has continued up to the present. Recent high-profile cases include Saddam al-Jamal, the thuggish IS emir in eastern Syria who was netted in a sting operation in 2018 after the capture of Delegated Committee operative Ismail al-Ithawi (Abu Zayd al-Iraqi), and Abd al-Nasr al-Qardash in 2020, another Delegated Committee official whose real name might or might not be Taha al-Ghassani.
Terrorism in the Grip of Justice briefly stopped broadcasting in mid-2005, several months after it was launched, precisely because of this issue that it was improperly inducing self-incriminating statements. This was partly a result of international pressure from the United Nations and “human rights” groups, but the criticism came from within Iraq as well, from the Iraqi Bar Association and other civil society elements. The Iraqi government spokesman at the time, Laith Kubbah, directly said the broadcasts were “illegal”. By February 2009, however, Baghdad had a change of heart and the broadcasts resumed.
Al-Badri was given prisoner number US9IZ-157911CI and held at Camp Bucca.
The exact word Asma Mohammed uses for the Yazidi sex slaves is “sabaya”, a word that became central to a global controversy in May 2024 when Israel released a video of HAMAS terrorists during the 7 October 2023 pogrom shouting the word at Jewish women they had abducted and translated it into English as “women who can get pregnant”. Apologists insisted “sabaya” meant simply “female captives” and had no sexual connotations. There were fierce denunciations of Israel for “racism” and “orientalism”, for playing on negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. The reality is that Israel was correct—the translation used was, if anything, too soft. “Sabaya” has a very direct association with rape at this stage, specifically when used by Islamist groups about their “infidel” captives.
Making the point in another way, an 11-year-old Yazidi girl taken into slavery when the Islamic State genocide began in the summer of 2014, Fawzia Amin Sido, was sold to a Palestinian man who was in Iraq at the time and transferred to HAMAS-ruled Gaza, where she has spent ten years being passed between “owners” in the Strip. The IDF says the “terrorist who had been holding her” was recently killed in an airstrike in Gaza. Whether the man holding Sido hostage was a HAMAS operative is unclear, but in a totalitarian system such as that run by HAMAS—where the borders in particular are closely monitored and there are so few of them—there is no way the HAMAS regime was unaware of Sido’s presence and predicament, and self-evidently did not disapprove of it. In a “complex operation coordinated [with] the United States and other international actors”, Israel rescued Sido this week and she is now back home with her family.
It seems there was some “competition” over Mueller among the IS leadership. One of Al-Badri’s senior deputies, Fadel al-Hiyali (Abu Muslim al-Turkmani or Abu Mutaz al-Qurayshi), a former member of Saddam’s Special Forces and IS’s governor of Iraq when he was killed in August 2015, had tried to get the caliph to hand Mueller over to him.
The insurgent landscape immediately after Saddam fell, when the IS movement was a smaller element, is to be kept in mind when assessing the claim of a “Ba’thist” takeover within IS after 2010. The claim falls when the timeline is examined: the former regime elements (FREs) that became so prominent in IS’s leadership in the caliphate era, including the famous Samir al-Khlifawi (Haji Bakr or Abu Bakr al-Iraqi), had all joined the IS movement in 2003-04 when it was very decided ideological choice, rather than opportunistic bandwagoning.
Falaha is among a handful of men without whom IS would have developed differently. Others, in my view, include Abd al-Rahman al-Qaduli (Abu Ali al-Anbari) and Wael al-Ta’i (Abu Muhammad al-Furqan).
January 2012 is six months before Al-Badri made his first “proper” speech, among other things.
Dudarkaeva, captured in Turkey a month after Asma Mohammed, was the spouse of Tarkhan Batirashvili (Abu Umar al-Shishani), the telegenic Chechen with more lives that Izzat al-Duri, who was finally killed for real in July 2016. And we know no more about Dudarkaeva now than we did when her arrest was announced in July 2018.