Turkey has captured a wife of slain ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Wednesday.
“The United States said Baghdadi killed himself in a tunnel. They started a communication campaign about this,” Erdogan said, according to Reuters.
“But, I am announcing it here for the first time: We captured his wife and didn’t make a fuss like them.”
He added: “Similarly, we also captured his sister and brother-in-law in Syria,” he said in a speech at Ankara University.
He offered no details about the woman, one of al-Baghdadi’s four wives, including her name and how she was captured.
The ISIS leader blew himself up during an Oct. 26 raid by US special forces on his heavily fortified safe house in the Syrian province of Idlib.
In a televised address after the mission, President Trump described al-Baghdadi’s final moments and said two of his wives were also killed.
Rasmiya Awad, 65, al-Baghdadi’s eldest sister, was nabbed Monday with her family on a trailer container near the town of Azaz in a region of Syria occupied by Turkey.
She was with her husband, daughter-in-law and five children when she was detained.
A Turkish official said Awad is suspected of being affiliated with the extremist group and called her capture an intelligence “gold mine.”
It was inclear 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.
Also, one of hi ex-wives was arrested in Lebanon in 2014, and was freed a year later in a prisoner swap with al-Qaida.
At one point, al-Baghdadi also was believed to have been married to a German teenager in 2015 but she was reported to have fled a year later.
With Post wires