When ISIS rose, the world focused on its fighters  and ruthless leaders, but behind them stood the wives.

And as the caliphate collapsed, these women  discovered that their husbands’ power could not save them.

What followed was vengeance and an end  as brutal as the terror they once lived beside.

It started when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared  the ISIS caliphate in Mosul on June 29, 2014.

His words were not just for fighters.

His speech called for men and women to join what he described as a new Islamic empire.

The  announcement spread quickly through social media, videos, and propaganda magazines.

Within  weeks, men were pouring into Iraq and Syria   from all over the world.

And with them came  women, wives, brides, and widows of jihad.

Some of these women were already married  to ISIS fighters before the caliphate was   declared.

Others traveled from places as far as  Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia to become “jihadi brides.

” Online recruiters promised them  a life of dignity, purpose, and religious duty.

In reality, many of them were stepping  into a life of control, fear, and violence.

In cities like Mosul, Raqqa, and  Fallujah, ISIS seized homes, schools, and even hospitals.

The wives of commanders  and fighters moved into these stolen houses.

They often lived in relative comfort  compared to the starving local population.

While ordinary families struggled to find food,  some ISIS wives had access to electricity,   water, and supplies brought  in through smuggling networks.

Not all women had a choice in this life.

Many  Yazidi and Christian women were taken as captives, forced into marriages with ISIS leaders.

For them, the title of “wife” meant slavery.

They were controlled, abused, and stripped of  freedom, treated as part of the spoils of war.

Among the loyal wives, some became more than  just silent partners.

They played active roles in the system of terror.

In Raqqa, female police  units known as the al-Khansaa Brigade were made up mostly of ISIS wives.

They patrolled  the streets, making sure women wore full black coverings, and punished anyone who broke  the rules.

Punishments could include lashings,   imprisonment, and even execution.

These wives  were feared almost as much as their husbands.

By 2015, intelligence agencies estimated that  more than 4,700 foreign women had joined ISIS across Iraq and Syria.

They came from countries  like Tunisia, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

Some were as young as teenagers.

Others were widows of earlier conflicts who   saw ISIS as a chance to start over.

Their fates  became tied to the rise of the men they married.

But as ISIS expanded, so did the number  of its enemies.

The wives believed they   were protected by their husbands’  power.

They did not realize that the same rise that gave them comfort and  authority would soon bring destruction.

And that destruction began by 2016, when the  so-called caliphate was no longer growing.

It was shrinking.

Cities that ISIS had once controlled  with an iron grip began to fall one after another.

The most important battle started in October 2016,  the fight for Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

The Iraqi Army, Kurdish forces, and coalition  allies surrounded Mosul step by step.

Airstrikes hit supply lines, bridges, and ISIS checkpoints.

Food and medicine became harder to find.

Ordinary families were trapped in their homes,   and the wives of ISIS leaders suddenly  found themselves in the middle of a siege.

Inside the city, loyalty began to crack.

Wives of  commanders like Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani tried to disguise themselves as  civilians and escape.

But people recognized them.

Many locals had lost brothers, fathers, and  children to ISIS executions, and they were filled with rage.

When these wives were caught,  some were beaten to death on the spot.

For the victims’ families, this was revenge.

For the  women, it was a brutal end to years of privilege.

Mosul’s Old City became the hardest battleground.

The narrow alleys were packed with families hiding in cellars and basements.

Women clutched their  children while bombs fell from the sky.

Some begged Iraqi soldiers to spare them, hoping their  children could survive even if they themselves were punished.

But others made a different choice.

A number of ISIS wives strapped on suicide belts, waiting for the moment soldiers  entered.

They blew themselves up,   killing not only the advancing troops but also  anyone nearby, including women and children.

Their deaths did not come in the way  they imagined, there was no honor, no safety, no protection.

Their last  hours were spent in dark cellars,   with explosions overhead and fear all around.

While Mosul was crumbling, Raqqa in Syria became  the beating heart of ISIS.

From 2014 until 2017, it was their self-declared capital.

This was where  orders were given, where propaganda videos were made, and where many of the group’s most powerful  leaders lived with their families.

By 2017, however, Raqqa itself was under siege.

The  Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by heavy   U.

S.

airstrikes, had surrounded the city.

For  the wives of ISIS leaders, Raqqa became a cage.

The city was overcrowded.

Thousands of ISIS  fighters had moved their families there,   believing Raqqa was the safest stronghold.

Mansions, government buildings, and stolen homes were filled with wives and children.

Some women lived in relative comfort,   with food and supplies smuggled in.

Others were trapped in crumbling houses,   hiding from the bombings  that shook the city daily.

One of the most well-known ISIS leaders in Raqqa  was Turki al-Binali, a cleric from Bahrain who had risen to become the group’s chief religious  scholar.

His wife and children lived with him in Raqqa, moving from one safe house to another.

When an airstrike killed al-Binali in May 2017, his family’s life changed instantly.

His  widow tried to escape with her children,   but she was quickly caught.

Kurdish fighters  found her hiding in underground tunnels, the same kind of tunnels many ISIS  families used as their last refuge.

Other women never made it that far.

As the siege  tightened, civilians who had suffered under ISIS rule saw their chance for revenge.

They knew which  houses belonged to ISIS leaders.

Wives suspected of being connected to commanders were dragged from  hiding places.

Some were beaten in the streets.

Others were burned alive in public squares.

Years  of terror had turned into an explosion of anger.

By 2018, the caliphate was falling apart  everywhere.

One city after another slipped out of ISIS control.

What was once a vast  empire across Iraq and Syria had shrunk to patches of desert and broken towns.

Deir ez-Zor, a province in eastern Syria, became one of the last hiding places.

Fighters,  their wives, and children crammed into small   villages along the Euphrates River, moving  constantly to escape bombs and advancing troops.

For the women, life was now stripped of the  luxury they once had.

Many ended up in detention camps like al-Hol and Roj, guarded by Kurdish  forces.

These camps quickly filled with tens of thousands of women and children.

Life inside was  unbearable.

The ground was muddy in winter and scorching in summer.

Food was limited, often just  bread, rice, or lentils.

Clean water was scarce, and disease spread fast through the tents.

Mothers struggled to keep their children alive,   while many babies died from malnutrition  or infections that went untreated.

Among the women trapped were foreign recruits,  including the young British girls who had left London in 2015, the “Bethnal Green girls.

”  By 2018, some of them had become widows, while others were still raising children  fathered by ISIS fighters.

Their lives had gone from school uniforms in London to rags in  the dust of Syria.

They were not alone.

Thousands of women from Europe, Asia, North Africa,  and the Middle East were in the same camps,   unwanted by their home countries and despised by  locals who saw them as the faces of ISIS cruelty.

Not all women made it to the camps.

On the  frontlines, Syrian soldiers and rival militias showed little mercy.

If they found out a woman was  the wife of a senior commander, the punishment was often instant death.

Some were executed in front  of their children.

Others were dragged away and never seen again.

The chaos made it impossible  to count how many were killed during this period, but stories of women shot in villages or  left behind in mass graves became common.

By March 2019, the war against  ISIS had reached its final stage.

The once powerful caliphate that stretched across  two countries was now reduced to a single village, Baghouz, in eastern Syria.

This dusty  settlement on the banks of the Euphrates   River became the last stronghold for thousands  of fighters and their families.

The world’s most feared terror group was trapped in a  patch of land less than two square miles.

The situation inside Baghouz was desperate.

Wives of ISIS fighters lived in makeshift  tents built from blankets, plastic sheets, and scraps of metal.

Smoke from constant  airstrikes filled the sky, and gunfire echoed through the fields.

Food and water were  running out.

Children cried from hunger.

Mothers   dug shallow holes in the dirt to protect their  babies from shrapnel.

Every day felt like the end.

American drones circled above,  watching every move.

On the ground,   Kurdish fighters from the Syrian  Democratic Forces slowly advanced, cutting off escape routes.

Wives of senior leaders  like Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, ISIS’s spokesman, were cornered with no way out.

Some of these  women carried rifles, ready to fight alongside   their husbands.

Others clutched their babies,  hoping to survive the storm that was closing in.

The final assault was brutal.

Airstrikes  pounded Baghouz, tearing apart tents and shelters.

Hundreds were killed in a matter  of days.

Many women refused to surrender.

Some strapped suicide vests to themselves.

Others tried to run across the open desert,   only to be gunned down by fighters  who saw them as dangerous threats.

There were also women who chose to  end their lives on their own terms.

One report described a group of wives  setting themselves on fire inside a tent rather than face capture.

To them,  surrender was worse than death.

For others, the choice was taken away.

Bombs fell without  warning, and families were buried where they sat.

When Baghouz fell on March 23,   2019, the ISIS dream ended.

But for the  wives, their nightmare had only begun.

After Baghouz, more than 60,000 women  and children were sent to detention   camps in northeast Syria.

Families had  to live in thin tents that offered little protection from the freezing winters  and burning summers.

Water was dirty,   food was limited, and medical care  was almost impossible to find.

The camps also became breeding  grounds for anger and revenge.

Some women remained deeply loyal to ISIS and  refused to accept defeat.

They formed hidden groups, enforcing their own strict rules inside  the fences.

Any woman who spoke against ISIS or tried to leave the ideology was seen as a traitor.

These loyalists carried out brutal punishments.

In 2019 alone, more than 80 murders were reported  in al-Hol, many of them women stabbed to death in their tents or strangled at night.

Even guards  were attacked with knives and smuggled weapons.

Children in the camps grew up surrounded by  violence and fear.

Many never went to school and had no toys or safe places to play.

Instead,  they listened to mothers telling them about “martyrdom” and revenge.

Aid workers warned that  these camps could raise a new generation filled with the same hatred that fueled ISIS in the first  place.

The world looked away, but the suffering   inside these fences showed that even though ISIS  had lost its land, its shadow still lived on.

In Iraq, the hatred left behind by the group  was overwhelming.

They had killed thousands, destroyed whole neighborhoods, and left behind  countless mass graves.

When they finally lost power, the anger of ordinary people boiled  over.

In towns like Tikrit, Fallujah, and Mosul,   families of victims did not wait for courts or the  government to act.

They wanted their own revenge.

Many locals believed that the wives were not  innocent.

Some had helped their husbands recruit, collect money, or even point out neighbors  who resisted.

Even if a wife had no role, her connection to ISIS made her a target.

By  2017, stories spread of women being dragged from their homes or from refugee camps and punished  in public.

One case in Tikrit showed the full force of this anger where a widow of an ISIS emir  was pulled into the street by families who had   lost sons and brothers to ISIS firing squads.

She was stoned to death as the crowd shouted.

In Fallujah, scenes of revenge were  recorded and shared online.

Videos   showed women in black robes lined up  against walls, executed by firing squads after only minutes in front of makeshift  judges.

These trials were quick and harsh.

There was no time for defense or appeals.

For many Iraqis, prison was not enough.

They had lived through years of terror, and now  they believed only death could balance the scales.

In Mosul, locals attacked anyone linked to the   group.

Women suspected of being ISIS  wives were beaten in the streets, their houses set on fire, or handed to  militias who carried out swift executions.

The brutality reached a point where  even human rights groups admitted they   could not count the exact number of women  killed.

This was revenge without limits.

But, not every ISIS wife was killed in the  streets.

Some were captured and taken into courtrooms.

In Baghdad, the Iraqi government  decided to show no mercy.

Between 2018 and 2020, hundreds of women stood trial.

Many of them  were not Iraqi.

They had come from countries like Russia, Germany, France, and even the  United States to marry ISIS fighters.

Now,   far from home, they faced Iraqi judges who  carried the weight of years of bloodshed.

The trials were fast and unforgiving.

Most  lasted less than ten minutes.

There were no long defenses, no detailed questioning.

Judges  usually had a single question asking whether they were married to an ISIS fighter or not.

If the  answer was yes, it was almost always enough for a   death sentence or life in prison.

For the courts,  the marriage itself was proof of loyalty to ISIS.

The punishments were real and public.

In  2018, a Russian woman only 20 years old was executed in Baghdad after admitting she  had joined her husband in Mosul.

In 2017, a German woman was also sentenced to death for  supporting ISIS and living under its rule.

Dozens of others from France, Turkey, and Central Asia  faced the same fate.

For Iraq, these women were   not victims.

They were seen as part of the  machine that had killed thousands of Iraqis.

Even those who escaped execution did not  truly escape punishment.

Life in Iraqi prisons was brutal.

Torture and beatings were  common.

Many women died in prison long before their sentences could be carried out.

For them,  the prison itself became a slow death sentence.

For the women who came from faraway countries,  their own governments refused to take them back.

Officials in Paris, London, and Berlin  said they were too dangerous to return,   and that they should stay in Syria  or Iraq to face justice there.

By 2019, reports showed more than 7,000  foreign wives and children were trapped in Syrian camps.

Many had already lost their  husbands, who were killed in battle or blown apart by airstrikes.

Others had seen their  men captured and executed.

Left behind,   the women had no country to return  to and no way to move forward.

Some of the women tried to find  ways out.

Smuggling networks grew   inside and around the camps.

For large  amounts of money, smugglers promised to sneak them across borders into Turkey or  back into Iraq.

A few managed to escape, but many were caught along the way and  either sent back to the camps or killed.

Others didn’t even make it that far; guards  often opened fire on women trying to run.

The families of ISIS’s top leaders carried the  weight of their husbands’ names, and for enemies of ISIS, that alone was enough to seal their  fate.

When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself up during a U.

S.

Special Forces raid in Idlib on  October 26, 2019, the shock was felt worldwide.

But the story did not end with him.

His surviving  wives were soon captured.

They became trophies in a dangerous game.

Rival militant groups did not  want them alive.

Some were quietly executed,   their bodies left in secret graves, so that no  trace of Baghdadi’s bloodline could survive.

The same pattern repeated with his successor,  Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi.

On February 3, 2022, U.

S.

forces stormed a safehouse in  Atmeh, a town near the Turkish border.

Qurashi detonated a bomb, killing himself, his  children, and his wives in an instant.

Their bodies were crushed under the rubble.

For the  world, it was another blow to ISIS’s leadership.

For the families inside, it was a brutal end  without dignity, buried in dust and blood.

Today, the wives of ISIS leaders are  scattered across graves, prisons,   and dusty camps.

Few remain alive.

Most  met their last hours in pain and terror.