ANKARA: Turkey has captured a wife of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday, more than a week after the former Daesh leader killed himself during a raid by US special forces.
“The United States said Baghdadi killed himself in a tunnel. They started a communication campaign about this,” Erdogan said.
“But, I am announcing it here for the first time: We captured his wife and didn’t make a fuss like them. Similarly, we also captured his sister and brother in law in Syria,” he said in a speech at Ankara University. He gave no details.
A senior Turkish official said earlier this week that Turkey had captured Al-Baghdadi’s sister, her husband and daughter-in-law, and hoped to gain intelligence from them about Daesh, although Ankara has not said what knowledge they may have had about the group’s operations.
Al-Baghdadi rose from obscurity to lead the ultra-hard-line group and declare a caliphate, holding sway over huge areas of Iraq and Syria from 2014-2017 before Daesh’s control was wrested away by a US-led coalition.
World leaders have welcomed his death, but they and security experts warned that the group, which carried out atrocities against their enemies and religious minorities s, remained a security threat in Syria and beyond.
Last month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said two of Al-Baghdadi’s wives had also been killed at the site of last month’s raid.
The group said a successor to Al-Baghdadi, identified as Abu Ibrahim Al-Hashemi Al-Quraishi, had been appointed. A senior US official said last week that Washington was looking at the new leader to determine where he came from.
