When Saja Al Dulaimi talks about her ex-husband, to whom she was married briefly in 2008, it’s almost as if she’s speaking of three different men.
There was the man named Hesham Mohammad, just “a normal person,” a “university lecturer” specialising in Sharia law. A “normal family man” who “loved the children,” who loved him back. “He was their idol. He was an excellent person in that respect,” she told Kassel Hamad, a correspondent for Sweden’s Expressen in an unusual interview from an undisclosed location. The interview was published on Thursday.
Then there was Hesham Mohammad, the “mysterious” man, who rarely talked about his past, and would disappear for days at a time, claiming that he was visiting his brother.
And finally, there was the man she said she saw in a picture she was handed years later by Lebanese authorities. “They showed me pictures of my ex-husband and asked me if I recognised him.”
She added: “It turns out I was married to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.”
Yes, that Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the brutal leader of Daesh, which has spread terror and death across four continents, the most wanted man in the world who has appeared only in murky videos and Daesh propaganda threatening death, destruction and a new Caliphate, with him as Caliph.
Hamad reported that his interview was conducted at a secret location near the Syria-Lebanon border, by prior agreement far away from the home where Al Dulaimi lives with her four children, two of whom she had with her first husband, who she says was an officer in the bodyguard unit of Saddam Hussain and was later killed in action fighting American troops as part of the resistance movement formed by Saddam’s generals.
“I didn’t notice that he was active in any way,” she said of the man who would become Al Baghdadi. “I moved into his home and that’s where we lived. So many of us living together in the same apartment was tough. There was him, me and my children and his first wife and her children.”
Her story, her professed ignorance of her former husband’s activities, is at odds with what Lebanese officials told The Washington Post last year.
As The Washington Post reported: “For months, the ex-wife of perhaps the most wanted man in the world used Lebanon as a base to secretly transfer cash to Islamist militants, according to Lebanese military officials. She concealed her identity with fake documents, which listed her as a Syrian citizen named Mallak Abdullah, the officials said. Eventually, they said, they discovered that she was Saja Al Dulaimi, an Iraqi who had been briefly married six years ago to the man who now heads the Daesh, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.”
In November, the army detained Al Dulaimi with a girl who is Al Baghdadi’s biological daughter, the officials said. They described her as a strong-willed and independent woman. Military officials said she transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to militants operating along Lebanon’s border with Syria.
“She’s not your stereotypical woman,” said Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the London School of Economics. He described Al Dulaimi’s profile as that of an “‘honorary jihadi man’ in the eyes of such groups”.
The occasion for that article was her release in November 2015 after more than a year in custody in Lebanon as part of a prisoner swap involving Lebanese security forces held captive by militants in Syria.
Free now, reports Hamad, she would like to relocate in the West.
“She says that she does not want to remain in the Arab world,” Hamad wrote.
“When I ask her why the West would want to welcome Al Baghdadi’s ex-wife while he is massacring civilians in terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, she quotes a verse from the Quran: ‘No bearer of burdens shall bear another’s burden.’
“‘Where is my guilt? I was married to him in 2008. We’re divorced now. I was the one who left him. I’m a woman who has been through a lot and who has suffered in prison. If I wanted to live with Al Baghdadi, I could have lived like a princess. I don’t want money. I want to live in freedom.’”
She explained to Hamad how she came to wed Al Baghdadi, aka Hesham Mohammad.
“Saja felt lonely and weak after losing her first husband,” he wrote. “Her mother, father and siblings had all moved to Syria. Both of his sisters’ husbands were gone — one was killed by American troops and the other just went missing. She says that she needed help and support.”
So she married Al Baghdadi.
Lebanese officials have told The Washington Post that the marriage was pushed by Al Dulaimi’s father, Hamid Al Dulaimi.
“Marriages in Iraq’s tribal area can be politically motivated affairs aimed at cementing ties between families, and Hamid Al Dulaimi may have sought an alliance with [Al] Baghdadi at a time when the younger man and other militants were incensed by the US occupation and were gravitating to Al Qaida in Iraq,” the precursor to Daesh, wrote The Post’s Naylor and Haidamous.
Al Dulaimi told Expressen that she “fled” from Al Baghdadi, because she wasn’t happy and his first wife was “very upset”. Nor, she said, was she in love with him. “I didn’t love him.”
Al Baghdadi, Hamad reported, got in touch with her after their daughter was born and tried to get her back. She said she refused.
Thinking everything was calm in Syria at the time — she says she only watched Syrian television — she went to Damascus where she was arrested by the Syrian security services while she was on her way to see her father. She was held for six months in a Syrian prison before being released in a prisoner exchange in March 2014, she told Expressen.
“They wanted to get to my father,” she told Expressen. “He’d been on the phone with my brother Khalid, who had helped armed groups like the Free Syrian Army.”
After she was freed in the prisoner swap, she went to Lebanon, crossing the border illegally, where she was arrested again only to be released later in another swap, she told Expressen. It was in Lebanon where authorities showed her the photos of Al Baghdadi.
“I’d been married to the most dangerous man in the world,” she told Hamad. “I smashed a window in anger.”
