Life inside ISIS uncovered as leader’s widow shares grim details from prison

The widow of a former ISIS leader has bared all in a rare prison interview as she opened up about what life was like inside ISIS, married to one of its top leaders.

Umm Hudaifa has claimed her husband was subjected to “sexual torture” while in a US prison in Iraq. She was the first wife of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the pair were married while he was in charge of the extremist’s barbaric rule over Syria and Iraq from 2014 until his death in 2019.

While under al-Baghdadi’s leadership, ISIS took thousands of women as slaves, killed hostages, and massacred civilians, with the majority of them Muslims in Iraq and Syria. Hudaifia, who was living in Raqqa, IS’s then-stronghold in Syria, with her husband in 2014, is now being held in an Iraqi jail as she is investigated for terrorism-related crimes.

READ MORE:ISIS makes chilling threat to bomb opening ceremony of Paris Olympics

In an interview with BBC News, Hudaifia said her late husband was “conservative but open-minded” but his year-long jail stint in Camp Bucca had a lasting impression on him. Al-Baghdadi was arrested after founding a militant Sunni group to fight US and allied Western occupation forces.

This is where he developed “psychological problems” after his release, according to his widow, who admitted, “he became short-tempered and given to outbursts of anger.” When she pressed him on what the cause was, he reportedly told her that “he was exposed to something that ‘you cannot understand.”

Despite not telling Huadaifa directly, she believes “he was subjected to sexual torture.” Images from another US-run prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, showed prisoners allegedly forced to simulate sexual acts and adopt humiliating poses.

Hudafia said she would search his clothes when he came back home and search while he was taking a shower or asleep. “I’d even search his body for bruises or injuries… I was perplexed,” she said. “I told him back then, ‘You’ve gone astray’… it drove him into a raging fit.”

She recalled having a television in the home she shared with her husband and children that she used to watch in secret, saying she would “turn it on when he wasn’t at home” and that he thought it didn’t work. As the leader of the extremist group, al-Baghdadi would often spend time in other locations away from home. Hudaifa claimed her husband cut her off from the world and he hadn’t let her watch television or use any other technology since 2007.

During one of his stints away, al-Baghdadi sent a guard to the house to pick up two of their young sons, with Hudaifa saying she had been told the boys were being taken to the beach to learn to swim. But while her husband was away, Huddaifa switched on the television and got a “huge surprise” when she saw her husband addressing the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, showing himself for the first time as the self-professed Islamic caliphate.

It was al-Baghdadi’s first public appearance in years as he demanded allegiance from Muslims in a broadcast seen across the world that marked a pivotal moment for ISIS. Hudaifa was shocked to realise her sons were actually in Mosul with her husband rather than learning to swim as she’d been led to believe. Being cut off from television and the outside world, she would never have known if it weren’t for her secret television.

The couple often moved house with fake identities, and Hudaifa is among a growing group of women who went to live with IS but now say they didn’t understand what they were getting into. Looking back at her views of ISIS’s actions at the time, she said she couldn’t even look at the pictures. She described the atrocities carried out by the terrorist group as a “huge shock, inhuman” adding “to spill blood unjustly is a horrendous thing and in that regard, they crossed the line of humanity.”

Hudaifa told the BBC she challenged her husband about having “the blood of those innocent people” on his hands, going on to tell him that “according to Islamic law there are other things that could have been done, like guiding them toward repentance.”

She went on to describe how her husband would communicate with ISIS’s leaders using a laptop he kept locked in a briefcase. She explained how she tried to “break into it to find out what was happening” but said she was “technologically illiterate and it always asked me for a passcode.”

Hudaifa tried to escape but was stopped by armed men at a checkpoint who sent her back to her home. After al-Baghdadi’s Mosul speech, he married their daughter, Umaima, then 12, to a friend, Mansour. Hudaifa said she tried to prevent it but was ignored. In August 2014, Hudaifa gave birth to another daughter, Nasiba, who had a heart defect.

At the same time, she claimed Mansour brought nine Yazidi girls and women to the house, aged between nine and 30. They were among thousands of Yazidi women and children enslaved by ISIS with thousands more killed. Hudaifa recalled the incident saying she was shocked and “felt ashamed.” The dad of one young girl in the group and sister of another have filed a civil lawsuit against Hudaifa for colluding in the kidnapping and enslavement of Yazidi girls.

They do not believe she was a helpless victim and are fighting for her to face the death penalty. Soad, one of the girls’ sisters who was enslaved, raped and sold seven times herself but did not meet Hudaifa, said: “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.” Adding: “She is the wife of the criminal Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and she is a criminal just like him.”

In response to Soad’s comments, Hudaifa said: “I don’t deny that my husband was a criminal”, but added she is “very sorry for what happened to them” and denies accusations against her. Al-Baghdadi was killed on October 27, 2019, during a US military raid in northern Syria. al-Baghdadi denoted an explosive vest when cornered in a tunnel, killing himself and two children as two of his four wives were killed in a shootout.

Hudaifa was not present as she had been living in Turkey under a false identity where she was arrested in 2018. The pair had been moving houses and had fake identities. Hudaifa was sent back to Iraq in February 2024 where she is being kept in prison as authorities investigate her role in ISIS.

Her eldest daughter Umaima is in jail with her, while one of her sons was killed in a Russian air strike in Syria, and another died with his dad in the tunnel. The youngest child is in an orphanage. The widow said her husband married a second wife but when she asked for a divorce she wouldn’t accept his demands of giving up their children and stayed with him.

This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.