Al Baghdadi, Turkey: "We have captured the wife"

The authorities have published a photo of his sister. It was not immediately clear whether Awad's capture made his wife's capture possible. One of the women of Al Baghdadi an Iraqi known as Nour, daughter of one of her helpers, Abu Abdullah al-Zubaie. was identified by name by the brother-in-law of the Caliph in a recent interview with Al Arabiya television. One of al-Baghdadi's ex-wives was arrested in Lebanon in 2014 and released a year later in an exchange of prisoners with Al Qaida. The former Iraqi wife, Saja al-Dulaimi, had fled from al-Baghdadi in 2009 when she was pregnant with her daughter. At one point, Al Baghdadi is believed to have wanted a German teenager in 2015 as a slave who may have fled a few years later. According to reports, the Caliph also held the American aid worker Kayla Mueller personally, who died in a raid in Syria in 2015.

The raid that killed Al Baghdadi was a blow to the Islamic state, which lost territories in Syria and Iraq in a series of military defeats inflicted by the coalition led by the United States and Syrian and Iraqi allies. The Baghdadi aide, a Saudi, was killed hours after the raid, including in northwestern Syria, in another US operation. Isis has named a successor after the death of the Caliph but great mystery still hovers over its identity and the consequences that the killing of Al Baghdadi had on the hierarchy of the group. Until his death, Al Baghdadi moved from one location to another in eastern Syria in the midst of military operations that led in fact to the defeat of ISIS, at least at the territorial level. His run ended in Idlib, in northwestern Syria, an area controlled by a rival militant group linked to al-Qaida. Not yet clear if any of the wives were with him at the time of his death.