Yazidi woman describes how she was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists aged 17 and repeatedly raped

Yazidi woman describes how she was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists aged 17 and repeatedly raped

A Yazidi woman has described how she was kidnapped by ISIS as a teenager and repeatedly raped and beaten by terror boss Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during his final as leader.

The woman, who cannot be named, was kept as a slave for months while the on-the-run boss desperately moved to towns and deserts in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border to seek safety as the extremists’ domains crumbled.

In his last months, al-Baghdadi became obsessed with his security before the brutal leader, once hailed as ‘caliph’, blew himself up during an October 26 raid by U.S. special forces on his heavily fortified safe house.

The Yazidi girl, who was freed in a U.S.-led raid in May, said al-Baghdadi first tried to flee to Idlib in late 2017.

She said one night she was loaded into a three-vehicle convoy that included the IS leader, his wife and his security entourage, headed for the province.

The convoy reached a main road but then turned around, apparently fearing it would come under attack, said the girl, who was 17 at the time.

For about a week they stayed in the southeastern Syrian town of Hajin, near the Iraqi border. Then they moved north to Dashisha, another border town in Syria within IS-held territory.

There, the Yazidi teen stayed for four months at the home of al-Baghdadi’s father-in-law, a close aide named Abu Abdullah al-Zubaie.

Al-Baghdadi would visit her there frequently and rape her and at times beat her, the teen said.

He would only move at night, wearing sneakers and covering his face, always with around five security men who addressed him as ‘hajji’ or ‘sheikh,’ she said.

‘When I asked him anything, he would not give me an answer for security reasons. Not everyone knew where he was,’ she said.

In the spring of 2018, she was given to another man, who took her out of Dashisha. That was the last time she saw al-Baghdadi, though he sent her a piece of jewelry as a gift, the teen said.

It appears al-Baghdadi then moved from place to place in eastern Syria for the next year as one IS stronghold after another fell to U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces, before heading to Idlib sometime in the spring.

During that time, al-Baghdadi was a ‘nervous wreck,’ pacing up and down and complaining of treason and infiltrations among his ‘walis,’ or governors of the group’s self-declared provinces, his brother-in-law, Mohamad Ali Sajit, said in an interview with Al-Arabiya TV aired last week.

‘This is all treason,’ Sajit recalled al-Baghdadi shouting.

Sajit, an Iraqi who was married to another of al-Zubaie’s daughters, was arrested by Iraqi authorities in June.

He said he saw al-Baghdadi several times over 18 months, starting in Hajin in late 2017. The last time was in the desert regions along the Syrian-Iraqi border not long before Sajit’s own capture. He said al-Baghdadi entrusted him with delivering messages on flash drives to lieutenants inside
Iraq.

Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish officials have said they separately cultivated sources that led to the IS leader, and Sajit is believed to be one of them. A U.S. official said it seemed the Syrian Kurds managed to get a ‘guest’ inside al-Baghdadi’s inner circle whose information was key in the hunt.

Sajit said al-Baghdadi’s movements were heavily restricted, more so as greater IS territory was lost. He walked around with a suicide belt, even slept with one near him, and made his aides also carry belts. He never used a cellphone; only his aide Abu Hassan al-Muhajer did, using a Galaxy 7, Sajit said.

The stress worsened the IS leader’s diabetes, and he had to constantly monitor his blood sugar and take insulin. He didn’t fast during the holy month of Ramadan and forced his aides not to fast as well, Sajit said.

At times, al-Baghdadi was disguised as a shepherd, he said. When al-Baghdadi’s security chief, Abu Sabah, got wind of a possible raid on the desert Syrian-Iraqi border area where they were hiding they took down their tents and hid al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajer inside a pit covered with dirt, Sajit said.

They let sheep roam around on top of the pit to further disguise it. Once the threat of the raid was over, they returned and put the tents back up, he said.

Source: Daily Mail