ESCAPE OF THE EVIL EMIR
Iraq forces narrowly missed chance to catch terror leader He went from shy child to the world’s most wanted man
ISLAMIC State’s evil leader escaped capture by moments – before his sickening sermons inspired followers to unleash terror across the globe.
badly wounded during an airstrike in the same district in March 2015. As with so many stories surrounding al-Baghdadi, what really happened remains a mystery.
In the film, Amara claims she too is holed up near the Iraq-Syria border.
She spent a year following in the elusive footsteps of the man previously referred to by his acolytes as First Emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Her research brought her into contact with his childhood friends, a former wife and several sex slaves.
The most telling anecdotes came from one of the girls, called Suzanne, who claims she was held as recently as last year. She claimed his home at the time was “like a big whorehouse”.
“There was sex all the time,” she says. “His wives were fighting over who would wear more make-up than the other.
“They used to bring girls for him to have sex with, and he would stay in the house and never go fighting.”
Another girl, who remains in hiding, told Amara she knew kidnapped American aid worker Kayla Mueller.
Kayla, who was abducted in Aleppo in 2013, was reportedly forced to marry al-Baghdadi, who raped her repeatedly. caliphate across his home country and neighbouring Syria.
It also allowed IS to inspire a series of bloody terrorist atrocities.
Western jihadis like Paris grocery store attacker Amedy Coulibaly, and the two French-born militants who slit the throat of a Catholic priest in Rouen last year, have claimed allegiance to IS.
Since being filmed apparently preaching from the pulpit inside Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri in July 2014, al-Baghdadi has not been seen in public.
And despite being the target of multiple bombing raids, analysts believe he remains at large. He was reportedly maker Sofia Amara explains how elite troops from Iraq’s Falcon Brigade missed out on capturing him by just minutes.
Like Saddam Hussein before him, al-Baghdadi was hiding in a basement bolthole, accessed through a disguised entrance in a tiled floor.
He escaped the hideout in northern Baghdad before soldiers arrived, leaving behind a cache of weapons, documents and black IS flags – the now familiar symbol of the reviled terror network.
The mission’s failure enabled the extremist, born in the Iraqi city of Samarra, to become the world’s most wanted man at the helm of a selfdeclared
New evidence unearthed for a documentary shows Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has a £20million bounty on his head, evaded Iraqi troops by fleeing through a basement bolthole in 2013.
The revelation has emerged as Iraqi forces claimed al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Ayad al-Jumaili, was killed in an air strike near Iraq’s border with Syria on Friday.
Al-Jumaili, an intelligence officer under Saddam Hussein, was described in an Iraqi TV report as Islamic State’s “secondin-command” and “war minister”.
As Iraqi forces besiege al-Baghdadi’s former stronghold in Mosul, the caliphate he declared in the city’s main mosque back in 2014 is crumbling apart.
The film, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: In The Footsteps Of The Most Wanted Man In The World, suggests swifter reactions earlier in the 45-year-old’s rise to power might have brought an end to the IS reign of terror sooner. Moroccan documentary