ISIS leader al-Baghdadi sanctioned a woman to be beheaded as a WEDDING PRESENT

The notoriously cruel woman asked to kill an unbelieving 'infidel' in return for taking a new husband following the death of her mujahedeen husband in a battle.

But al-Baghdadi insisted she could only take the life of another woman in line with the group's strict segregation of affairs between men and women. He ruled she could cut off the head of another female ISIS judge who had been accused of spying - but who in reality had probably just fallen out of favour. 

This barbaric gift is just one of series of shocking claims made by a female defector from ISIS' religious police, Hisbah - which rules the so-called Islamic State of around eight million people - with its own twisted and medieval interpretation of Sharia law.

During the harrowing interview, Leena - not her real name - gave an unparalleled insight into how the Islamic State is run.

She described the suffocating effect fear has in a society where children are used as informers, how one woman was given 80 lashes in public by 'mistake', the corrupt power struggle that led to her boss having her head chopped off, and the terrible treatment of Yazidi prisoners – given to ISIS fighters as sex slaves 'to do with whatever they like'.

Leena revealed how there are five British women in the Hisbah, including converts, who are apparently given preferential treatment by the ISIS leaders. Among them was a blonde woman called Susanne and a red head called Fatima.

The ISIS defector told MailOnline: 'When the foreign fighters and women first arrived we thought they were heroes. They had come to give their lives to fight for us, to fight for our freedom.'

But it soon became clear that they came for whatever 'money, gold and slaves' they could get. Leena branded them nothing more than rapists, looters and thieves.

As just one example of the horrors she saw on a daily basis, the 27-year-old mother-of-two told how a local girl was sentenced to death after the Hisbah discovered she had complained about life under ISIS in a WhatsApp message to her sister in Damascus.

In sad, hushed tones, Leena said: 'It was nothing more than murder. They said she was connected to Assad's regime, a spy.

'She wasn't receiving her salary and she could not travel to collect it. All she wrote in the text was "We are all under pressure", "We can't go on", "We are in trouble". 

Because of that the judge, originally from Egypt, gave her the death penalty. They said she was a spy for the Assad regime.'The girl had been telling the truth. Despite the vast oil deposits nearby the town's only electricity comes from diesel generators – controlled by senior ISIS members, called emirs. Air-conditioning can no longer offer families relief from the 50C summer heat. Water supply is erratic at best.Now in hiding and facing a life on the run, wide-eyed with fear, Leena said: 'I was horrified by what I saw, the brutality and corruption. I left because I saw so many terrible things, so much destruction, beatings.'

Recently married and pregnant with her first child, Leena fled from fighting in Deir Ezzor, once a prosperous provincial town on the banks of the Euphrates River and now the centre of Syria's oil industry, in September 2012, to a neighbouring village which became the ISIS regional HQ.

'All we knew was we had to pray five times day and fast during Ramadan', said Leena. 'Before no one wore a niqab (face veil), we did not wear Islamic clothing and there was no rules about talking with strangers - men who were not close family members.'

Leena freely admits that at first she fell for ISIS' hardline brand of Islam which they romantically painted as the true path for a Muslim. 

Her community, like the majority of Syria and ISIS follow the Sunni branch of Islam and consider Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as a heretic because he is a member of the Alawites, an obscure sect within the rival Shia vision of Islam.

Leena became inspired to learn more about Sharia Law and completed an ISIS indoctrination programme.

'We went around other villages to help people understand Sharia Law, to show them the way to follow Islam,' she said.

(dailymail.co.uk)