I’m glad they’ve killed her
White Widow’s ex-lover and father of her son greets news of US drone strike
THE father of a 12-year-old boy believed to have been killed in a US drone strike with his terrorist mother last night said he is ‘glad she is dead’.
Intelligence reports said Darren Dixon’s son JoJo was ‘likely’ to have been killed when a missile took out his mother Sally Jones, known as the White Widow, near the Syria and Iraq border in June.
The mother-of-two was Britain’s most wanted woman after leaving her home in Chatham, Kent, in 2013, and fleeing with JoJo, her youngest child, to join Islamic State in Syria.
Last night a defence source said the strike had been carried out by the CIA, which runs a fleet of Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles. It is understood the UK government was not consulted beforehand.
The operation was made possible after President Trump granted the CIA powers to kill terror suspects with drone strikes – outside the control of the military – in March.
Jones, a Muslim convert, was a key IS recruiter of female jihadis and had been designated a high value target because of the threat she posed to the West. She was believed to have been on her way from the group’s de facto capital Raqqa to the border town of Mayadin when she was killed. A terror unit tasked with orchestrating attacks on the West had moved to Mayadin in recent months.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said: ‘I can confirm, if you are a British national in Iraq or Syria and if you have chosen to fight for Daesh [IS]…then you have made yourself a legitimate target and you run the risk…of being at the wrong end of an RAF or a United States missile.’
Last night the unnamed brother of one of Jones’s recruits told ITV News: ‘Sally Jones was an evil woman who has destroyed our family and I hope she rots in hell.’
Meanwhile, Mr Dixon, who was in a relationship with Jones years before she fled to Syria, said: ‘I’m f ****** glad she’s dead.’
A friend of his added: ‘He has just found out his son might have died. The man has suffered enough.’
Katrina Wilkinson, the sister of another of Sally’s ex-partners, Jonathan, who had a child with Sally named Johnny, said: ‘I’m glad she’s gone. I’m glad she’s dead.
‘She’s a psycho and going to Syria is just something that she would do. It’s beyond me that she took her little one with her.’
Miss Wilkinson, 44, said she felt sorry for Johnny, now in his early 20s, whose father died aged 29 from alcohol-induced liver cirrhosis. She added: ‘The poor guy has no immediate family left…I feel gutted for Johnny and the fact little JoJo was dragged into it. As a baby being dragged over there and being brainwashed and now he could be dead…I think it’s disgusting for a parent.’
The Daily Mail revealed earlier this year that UK civilians were being killed in air strikes without Parliament being told.
It is thought Jones, 50, is the sixth Briton killed in Syria by a drone strike. Ministers have repeatedly refused to disclose the number of UK civilians killed by RAF jets in Iraq and Syria.
No 10 yesterday said there was no requirement for them to do so. A spokesman said: ‘Anyone who does travel to Syria for any reason is putting them in considerable danger and that’s particularly true if they’re fighting for our enemies.’
Whitehall sources confirmed Jones – whose jihadi husband Junaid Hussain was wiped out by a drone in 2015 – was killed in June in a US operation. They stressed it did not involve any British assets.
Sources said they could not be 100 per cent sure she was dead, but that she had stopped using social media and had not been spotted.
Her son, whom she had regularly used as a shield, was with her. It was said to be ‘likely’ he had been killed. He was not deliberately targeted, defence sources said.
US intelligence is understood to blame Jones for releasing a list of 1,300 US military personnel for IS fanatics to attack. The CIA declined to comment on the case.
‘Destroyed our family’