A British woman who joined ISIS, marrying an American jihadi who would become the terror organisation’s most senior US recruit, has said that she was partly motivated to do so by racism she experienced growing up.
Harrow-born Tania Georgelas, 33, said neighbours smashed in the windows of her home, where she was one of five children to a first-generation immigrant Bangladeshi family.
The pair travelled the world meeting other jihadis, and John convinced Tania to go to Syria when she was five and a half months pregnant with their fourth child. But soon her and the kids became ill, and John told her to leave.
He became the most senior American within ISIS, meanwhile Tania moved to Texas to live with John’s parents and divorced John. She now dates a man called Craig who she met on match.com and is studying online courses with plans to begin a deradicalisation programme for former terrorists.
Tania isn’t the only Westerner to return from living in Syria in support of ISIS. As the terror group’s power in Syria wanes, many devotees fought for it are returning home. Of the 850 Britons who went to Syria to fight for ISIS, more than 425 have returned to the UK. Overall at least 5,600 jihadis have returned to their home countries. The question now, is what to do with them. Legally, there’s a grey area - British citizens are allowed to come in and out of Britain, but on the other hand, they’ve fought or supported anti-Western terrorism.
Georgelas’s claim of racism driving her towards Islamic extremism aren’t unfounded. Islamophobic hatred amps up every time there is a terrorist attack committed by Islamist extremist in the UK, and it plays into ISIS’s hands; they want division, because a them-and-us narrative can provide them recruits. And it’s no wonder that most ISIS fighters are young, having grown up as teenagers or children in the shadow of increased Islamophobia in British society following 9/11.
As for John, she doesn’t want to testify in court against him if he returns to America, saying: ‘I know he wants to be a martyr, and I support that.’
Image courtesy of The Atlantic
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.