Wielding a machete with a Beretta as her sidearm, Um Hanadi leads a band of around 70 militiamen in Shirqat, a town 80 km south of Mosul, Iraq.
Meet “head” chef Wahida Mohamed, better known as Um Hanadi, who loves to cook heads of Islamic State (ISIS) members.
According to the CNN and the Sun, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has personally threatened her several times. The notorious militia leader, who is more wanted than the Iraqi Prime Minister, has survived six-to-seven assassination attempts. The ISIS tried to kill her using car bombs between 2006 and 2014—but she survived.
“I’m at the top of their most wanted list — even more than the Prime Minister,” the iron lady says. The bloody fury was triggered after her two husbands, father and three brothers were killed by the IS.
Hanadi told the CNN, “I fought them. I beheaded them. I cooked their heads, I burned their bodies. This is all documented. You can see it on my Facebook page.” Her boastings on the social media brought her to the attention of the terror group’s top brass.
Wielding a machete with a Beretta as her sidearm, she leads a band of around 70 militiamen in Shirqat, a town 80 km south of Mosul.
Armed with only Kalashnikovs, she has driven out the ISIS from her village. Among the 39-year-old’s means of terrifying the ISIS is publishing pictures of her hoisting the heads of decapitated extremists in the air. She readily admits boiling the heads of her enemies.
“I began fighting the terrorists in 2004 working with Iraqi security forces and the coalition,” Hanadi told the CNN. As a result, she attracted the wrath of what eventually became Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into the ISIS.
Hanadi claims to have led her men in multiple battles against the ISIS. General Jamaa Anad, the commander of ground forces in her native Salahuddin province, told the CNN’s Ben Wedeman that they had provided her group with vehicles and weapons. General Anad says, “She lost her brothers and husbands as martyrs.”
Hanadi describes herself as a “rabat manzal”—a housewife. She denied media reports she was a hairdresser although a photo on her Facebook page shows her without a headscarf in what appears to be a hair salon. She has two daughters, aged 22 and 20. They are trained and ready to fight, she says, but are busy at the moment taking care of their children.
Meanwhile, the United Nations said on Thursday that it expects, at least, 700,000 people in Mosul would need assistance once an expected offensive on the ISIS stronghold begins. “Mosul has the potential to be one the largest ... Disasters of many, many years,” warned Bruno Geddo, the United Nations’s refugee agency’s main representative in Iraq.
