Islamic State leader was 'obsessed' with women: wife

The first wife of slain Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi has said her husband and other members of the extremist organisation were "obsessed" with women.

The Islamic State leader and leaders in his organisation had become obsessed with women, and had turned the "Caliphate State" into "a state for women," Asma Mohammed said in an exclusive interview with the Al-Hadath television channel on Thursday evening.

She added that Al-Baghdadi and his organisation's obsession with women "went beyond the limits of humanity."

Mohammed, who was married al-Baghdadi in 1999, said that her husband had more than 10 Yezidi women as "slaves," adding that he once married a 13-year-old girl from Iraq.

Currently jailed in Iraq, Mohammed was clad in a black veil and was rarely looking straight at the camera throughout the whole interview.

She said that some of Al-Baghdadi's wives were as young as his daughters.

She stressed that foreign women played an important role in recruiting fighters.

According to al-Baghdadi's wife, US aid worker Kayla Mueller was also said to have been one of al-Baghdadi's slaves. Mueller was kidnapped by Islamic State in 2013 in the Syrian city of Aleppo and died in captivity.

Bahdadi's wife added that al-Baghdadi only cared about his personnel safety and ignored the rest of his family's well-being as they kept moving from one place to another.

She said she had six children with al-Baghdadi, but three had died, though she did not provide details as to where and how.

Al-Baghdadi's wife claimed that when they married, he was normal with no extremist views, but that changed after he was detained by US forces in 2004 "for no reason."

In the summer of 2014, Al-Baghdadi, as the leader of Islamic State, declared a "caliphate" in large areas of Iraq and the neighbouring civil war-torn country of Syria.

The terrorist organisation controlled the areas for years.

In August 2014, Islamic State attacked the Sinjar region of Iraq and captured thousands of Yezidi women, later turning them into sex slaves for the jihadists.

The extremist militant group, though it had captured large swathes of land in western and northern Iraq plus parts of Syria, was defeated in late 2017.

However, Islamic State cells are still active in both countries.

US special forces killed Al-Baghdadi in Syria in autumn 2019.