democratic forces have an estimated 130,000 women and children living in overflowing refugee camps becoming hotbeds for extreme ideology. with he see confusion surrounding the military policy and foreign policy. help us to understand the problem as it comes to refugees. we have to separate displaced persons and women and children known to be affiliated with isis. one camp holds 70,000 women and children that are known to be isis wives or supporters and their innocent children. they are living in filth. there is no mode of access to
50 days, you watched the last days days, hours of isis, as they tried to hang on. what are you thinking, now, as we seem to have two u.s. officials confirming to cnn, that they believe that al baghdadi is dead. it s significant. i was thinking about, what does all this mean? when we were interviewing, we interviewed dozens of isis wives and children. for few of them spoke about baghda baghdadi. their loyalty was to the islamic state. unlike, for instance, bin laden, who was a cult figure in al qaeda, al baghdadi wasn t seen as the embodiment of the
the so-called group in the fight against afghanistan. he remained a prominent public figure. from back then to his death. baghdadi was a much more secretive person who had a very low public profile. he never really had the sort of personality that osama bin laden actually encouraged. and when earlier this year, we were in eastern syria for two months, we interviewed dozens of captured fighters, isis wives and their children, and very few of them had much to say about abu bakr al baghdadi, himself. their loyalty was to the islamic state rather than to the person who was actually leading it. which could be troubling in the days and weeks to come. ben wedeman, thank you very much. other breaking news. overnight we know two people are dead and 14 have been treated for gunshot wounds after a
husbands enslaved those young gills. girls. and so when they came into the captivity of the kurdish fighting force, and the allies were fought by the turk, they caught the intel against, they made these arrests and they flipped these isis wives and specifically baghdadi s wife and some of his lieutenants. they felt so spurned with the way their husbands were behaving and they turned on them. and we had that reporting at the time several months ago and this is why the sdf which have since been more or less betrayed by the trump administration, why they were so truinstrumental in effort to try to get abu balr al-baghdadi. and the cia front and center
we have repeatedly heard. the kurdish forces who are not only at the front lines going after their sleeper cells, going after smaller pockets of terrain they controlled. and protecting the isis prisons and refugee camp that hold the isis wives and widows. they had to pull back their forces from some of those areas to take on the turks. and they effectively said they were suspending their operations against isis. hence these great concerns that isis is an entity that had not been entirely defeated was going to be able to capitalize on the chaos and the vacuum as one u.s. official said. this move effectively gave isis a second lease. and then you have the cost, john, to the civilian population upwards of 150,000 inside syria displaced. and of course the countless lives that have been lost. thank you, arwa. stay safe. keep reporting. this morning cnn also has