A Somali military court sentenced Fartun Abdirashid Hussein, the wife of Somalia’s ISIS-Somalia leader, Abdulkadir Mumin, to eight years in military prison today.
Fartun, who used Fa’iso, Asiyo, and Faysa as her aliases, was apprehended by security forces in March 2022 for being a member of the ISIS group and responsible for facilitating the group’s finances.
She was apprehended in Mogadishu’s Hilwaa district near the livestock market.
Mumin, Fartun’s husband, a former UK-based preacher and ex-Al-Shabaab theological leader, founded ISIS-Somalia in 2015 after declaring his allegiance to the Islamic State.
According to Somali security, she had a working relationship with the head of ISIS’s media department in Somalia and the recently killed leader Bilal al-Sudani.
A US military operation killed Bilal al-Sudani and ten members of the terror group in northern Somalia on Wednesday, two senior Biden administration officials said on Thursday.
“From a mountainous cave complex in northern Somalia, Bilal al-Sudani is assessed to have supported ISIS’ expansion and activities across Africa and beyond the continent,” the first senior administration official said.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed that al-Sudani had been killed in a statement later on Thursday.
The US treasury sanctioned Al-Sudani in 2012 for helping foreign fighters travel to an al-Shabaab training camp and facilitating financing.
Last March, the group gave bay’ah – or pledge of allegiance – to ISIS’s new leader Abu al-Hassan al-Hashemi al-Quraishi Abu Ibrahim al -Quraishi, who died last month alongside his successor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
According to Reuters, the new ISIS leader is Abu Ibrahim’s brother.
The court acknowledged that Fartun Abdirashid Hussein, the convicted woman, was responsible for hosting ISIS-Somalia members hiding in Mogadishu.
She was accused of sending between $100 and $200 to active ISIS members.
