40 ISIS Brides To Be Executed In Iraq

Up to 1,000 women alleged to have belonged to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have been captured in Iraq and more than 40 have been sentenced to death.

The defeat of ISIS in Iraq following months of bloody fighting that culminated in the capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, in December, has led to the capture of as many as 20,000 suspected fighters. Many are foreigners from 110 countries, who flocked to join the jihadist group and live and die in its brutal self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Hundreds of ISIS wives accompanied their husbands but many also traveled alone from Europe, Turkey, Russia and central Asia to ISIS-controlled areas and willingly entered arranged marriages with militants.

According The Guardian, the women – many with babies and young children – now face a swift reckoning at Baghdad’s central criminal court. All widowed following the many battles that led to the ultimate crushing of ISIS, their claims to be innocent victims who were misled into making the odyssey are frequently not believed. Foreign women get particularly short shrift.

“In the minds of Iraqis and the judiciary and the government, by virtue of the fact that you are foreign and chose to live in ISIS territory there is a level of agency in what you did and more culpability,” Belkis Wille, a senior researcher for Iraq for Human Rights Watch, told The Guardian. “It is not the same in the case of Iraqi women, where very specific evidence is often lessening sentences. If you buy a plane ticket, cross a border and make your choices, you are far more exposed.”

One of the youngest ISIS brides, a German schoolgirl named Linda Wenzel, joined the terror group at age 15 after being groomed online. Iraqi troops captured her hiding in the rubble of Mosul as they liberated the city.

German media reported that Wenzel, now 17, was sentenced to five years in prison for being an ISIS member and added another year for illegally entering Iraq.

"I have ruined my life," Wenzel told her visiting mother in a Baghdad prison last year. "I do not know how I came up with the stupid idea to go to the Islamic State."

Wenzel had feared that she might be executed for her crimes but instead received jail along with 10 other foreign ISIS widows, according to Al Jazeera, which also reported that a Turkish woman had been executed.

Wenzel's Chechen husband died in combat five months after they married. After his death, she texted her mother in Germany: "He is dead because of you, because your taxes paid for the bombs here."

American ISIS widow Samantha Sally, who was arrested after the collapse of Raqqa, remains in Syrian-Kurdish custody, waiting for the U.S. government to determine her fate.

Sally, a 32-year-old mother of two from Indiana, claims she was tricked into going to Iraq by her Moroccan-born husband and was beaten, tortured and sexually abused. Her son, Matthew, aged 10, was forced to appear in an ISIS video vowing revenge on President Donald Trump and threatening attacks on the West.