Iraq Sentences ISIS Widow to Death, Imprisons Others for Life

The Central Criminal Court in Baghdad has sentenced one Turkish ISIS widow to death and sent some of the jihadists’ wives to prison for life.

High Judicial Council spokesman Abdul Satar Bayraqdar said in a statement Monday that the convicted “were of different nationalities including a Turkish and Azeri convicts.” Bayraqdar said the court “sentenced ten women to life over involvement in terrorism, while a Turkish member was sentenced death,” according to Iraq News.

AFP reported that 11 women, some with infants, were sent to prison along with the death sentence and that except for the Azeri all were Turkish.

In January, the Baghdad court sentenced to death a German woman of Moroccan origin who decided to come to the Islamic State and join the terror group after two of her daughters married ISIS terrorists.

The latest women sentenced were between 20 and 50 years old.

Angie Omrane, the Azeri woman, said she met her ISIS husband online. “He proposed we meet in Turkey but an intermediary there told me he would drive me to my future husband without saying where,” she claimed. “I thought we were staying in Turkey but I found myself in Syria and then my husband took me to Iraq.”

The 48-year-old woman condemned to death said she “wanted to live in an Islamic state where sharia is the law of the land.”

Iraq is reportedly holding 509 foreign women who were ISIS wives, along with 813 children.

A late summer report by Kurdish news organization Rudaw went inside the al-Shahama camp, where 97 ISIS families were being housed by the Iraqi military in rows of tent homes surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and guarded by Iraqi security forces.

An Iraqi security officials explained that fleeing families were “scrutinized, and when we find out some of them were ISIS we bring them here.”

“You know, these people were ISIS families… some of them could be collaborators, or sleeper cells. The state takes these things into account,” the official said. “These people were under ISIS for three years. Their ideas could be within the group. Others condemn it.”

Officials also have considered the risk that ISIS remnants could attack to seize the women and children who fled from their onetime strongholds in Mosul and surrounding areas.