The Scottish grandmother who said ‘no’ to Isis

When Isis seized control of Mosul, Ellise Campbell had more reason than most in the Iraqi city to fear for her life.

The 64-year-old grandmother from Dunoon, Scotland, was sure she would be killed as soon as she was discovered. Instead, she found herself being courted by the jihadists, who wanted her to teach them English.

Isis (Islamic State) asked her many times to pledge allegiance to the terror group’s leader, Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, but on each occasion she refused. “You wouldn’t think it, but being British, and my age, gained me some respect with Isis,” she says. “Maybe they treated me differently because they thought I was a muhajir — one of those women who moved to Mosul to live under their caliphate — which was not the case, but it allowed me a bit more freedom than other women.”

Now safely settled in the northern Kurdistan city of Duhok after her neighbourhood was liberated by Iraqi forces last month, the mother-ofthree told of three years living under the Islamist group’s capricious and violent rule. Before Isis’ arrival in Iraq’s second city in June 2014, she helped run an English language institute called the Oxford Centre. Isis insisted she change its name to an Arabic one but, surprisingly, allowed her to carry on teaching.

She says every day Isis emirs, or leaders, would visit the centre to make sure her male and female students were being taught separately. But other than that, they interfered little. “They approached me one day and said they would bring 20-30 high-ranking commanders for night lessons at the centre,” she says. “I had to be careful what I said — you cannot say no to them. But I did — I made the excuse that I was too old to be working late at night, and they accepted that.

“I think with age comes power,” she says. “I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to speak back to them at 34, but at 64 I have no fear.”

She has called the city home for more than a decade. She met her husband Kamil, an Iraqi-Kurdish mechanical engineering professor, in 1980 in Glasgow. She was studying for a PhD in English language at one of the city’s universities. Three years after they married, she converted to Islam. She has since taken her husband’s surname.

The couple moved to Mosul in 2003.

Of Isis she said: “You can never truly understand how barbaric these people were unless you lived under them. They were devils.”

Her eldest sons left in mid-2015, paying US$600 each to a smuggler to escape. Having pain in her hips, she had little option but to stay.

There was a car bomb factory at the end of her road. In a house across the street, the militants kept child brides and the young widows of fighters. She worked next door to one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers. The foreigners were treated “like Gods”, but were the cruellest to civilians.

She has now moved in with one of her sons in Duhok. “There have been mostly bad times,” she laughs. “But I’m a survivor.”