IS widow helped CIA in hunt for Baghdadi

The captured widow of an Islamic State group leader helped the CIA in its hunt for the organization’s elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a British daily said yesterday.

In an interview with The Guardian, Nisrine Assad Ibrahim also claimed not to have played a willing part in the detention of US hostage Kayla Mueller at her home. She has been accused of helping to forcibly hold Mueller and other captives at the home, where the American woman was sexually assaulted by Baghdadi.

But when she herself was detained by the US military, the 29-year-old helped the CIA and Kurdish intelligence gain a detailed overview of the extremist supremo’s hideouts and networks, investigators told the daily. In February 2016, Ibrahim identified a house in the Iraqi city of Mosul in which Baghdadi was believed to have been staying, but the United States did not call in an air strike.

“I told them where the house was,” she told The Guardian at a jail in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil. “I knew he’d been there because it was one of the houses that were provided for him, and one of the places he liked the most.”