Turkey captures wife of dead Isis leader, says Erdogan

Turkey has captured a wife of the dead leader of Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

Mr Erdogan made the announcement while delivering a speech in the capital Ankara but gave no other details.

One of al-Baghdadi’s aides has said the shadowy Islamic State – also known as Isis – leader had four wives, the maximum number allowed at one time under Islamic law.

“We caught his wife, but we didn’t make a fuss about it. I am announcing this today for the first time,” Mr Erdogan said, while criticising the United States for leading a “communications campaign” about al-Baghdadi’s death.

UK election: How Brexit issues will affect the campaign debate

---

Welsh secretary Alun Cairns quits over rape trial allegations

---

Denis Staunton’s 10 seats to watch in the UK election

---

Democrats claim election wins in Kentucky and Virginia

---

The Islamic State leader blew himself up during an October 26th raid by US special forces on his heavily fortified safe house in the Syrian province of Idlib.

Mr 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.

Intelligence ‘gold mine’

The area is part of the region administered by Turkey after it carried out military incursions to chase away Islamic State militants and Kurdish fighters, starting in 2016. Allied Syrian groups manage the area known as the Euphrates Shield zone.

Awad was with her husband, daughter-in-law and five children when she was detained. A Turkish official said the 65-year-old sister is suspected of being affiliated with the extremist group and called her capture an intelligence “gold mine”.

It was not immediately clear if Awad’s capture led to intelligence that allowed for the detention of the wife.

One of al-Baghdadi’s wives is an Iraqi known by the name of Nour, the daughter of one of his aides, Abu Abdullah al-Zubaie. She was identified by name by al-Baghdadi’s brother-in-law in a recent interview with al-Arabiya TV.

The brother-in-law, Mohamad Ali Sajit, who is in Iraqi custody, said al-Baghdadi had four wives when he last met him, some time last summer.

Also, one of al-Baghdadi’s ex-wives was arrested in Lebanon in 2014, and was freed a year later in a prisoner swap with al-Qaida. 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 been married to a German teenager in 2015 but she was reported to have fled a year later.

Major blow

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.

Al-Baghdadi’s aide, a Saudi, was killed hours after the raid, also in north-western Syria, in a US strike. The group named a successor to al-Baghdadi days later, but little is known about him or how the group’s structure has been affected by the successive blows.

Up and until his death, al-Baghdadi had moved from place to place in eastern Syria amid a tightening US-led campaign against his group as Islamic State-held territory fell bit by bit.

He ended up in Idlib, in north-western Syria, an area controlled by a rival, al-Qaida-linked militant group. It was not clear if any of his wives were with him at the time of the raid, during which two of his children were killed. – AP