I stood up to IS devils of Mosul and survived
Grandmother tells of daily murders by brutal jihadis
A SCOTTISH grandmother has told of how she resisted IS terrorists and survived for years in an Iraqi city overrun by the jihadis.
Ellise Campbell saw daily executions and brutal reprisals against anyone who opposed the Islamic fundamentalists after they seized Mosul in 2014.
But despite living under crippling oppression and the constant scrutiny of religious ‘morality police’, the 64-year-old bravely refused to swear allegiance to IS.
She escaped a death sentence despite rejecting orders to give high-ranking IS commanders English lessons and repeatedly refusing to pledge her loyalty to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The teacher, originally from Dunoon, Argyll, moved to Mosul in 2003 with her Iraqi husband Kamil and helped run an English language institute called the Oxford Centre.
But when the city fell to IS, she feared she would be killed just for being a Westerner, although she is an Islamic convert.
She told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The things that went on in the city shocked me to my core. IS were masters in the art of death, always thinking of new ways to kill.
‘They beheaded people, buried them alive, put them in acid tanks, ran them over with bulldozers.
‘The Islam I studied was not the Islam of IS.
‘You can never truly understand how barbaric these people were unless you lived under them. ‘They were devils.’ She believes she was spared a gruesome fate because of a misunderstanding about why she was in Mosul.
She said: ‘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. They approached me one day and said they would bring 20 to 30 high-ranking commanders for night lessons at the centre.
‘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.’
Ms Campbell met husband Kamil, an Iraqi-Kurdish mechanical engineering professor, in 1980 in Glasgow and then converted to Islam three years into their marriage.
Despite describing herself as a ‘conservative Muslim,’ she says she was shocked at the brutal religious oppression instituted during IS’s occupation of Mosul.
The jihadis allowed her to continue teaching on the condition that the Oxford Centre was given a new Arabic name, but she was forced to run the gauntlet of zealous religious police to get to work at the centre.
She said: ‘Each Monday and Thursday there were female hisba (morality) police checking cars. My heart would pound in my chest, terrified they would find some reason to arrest me.
‘They would touch your hand to see if you had a ring on your finger, if you didn’t they would try to marry you off to IS fighters.’
She also warned that she believes there may be much greater numbers of British-born jihadists operating in IS-held territories than the security services are aware of.
She said: ‘There are more British fighters than they know about. I often heard British speakers of English.’
When family members fled the city in 2015, paying around £500 each to a smuggler to help them escape, she could not join them.
Because of pain in her hips which means she cannot walk far, she had no option but to stay.
Soon after that, IS put up more checkpoints and eventually she could only leave the house to go to the market or to work, and only if accompanied by a male relative.
When the Iraqi army arrived to liberate the city, she spent eight months hiding from the fighting in a friend’s basement.
She has since settled in Duhok, a city around 50 miles north of Mosul.
IS continues to lose ground to the Iraqi army in Mosul, while its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is believed to have been killed by a Russian air strike in Syria.
‘Unbelievable how barbaric they were’ ‘I was terrified they’d arrest me’