ISIS COULDN’T BREAK DAUGHTER’S SPIRIT
They slaughtered her dad and subjected her to a 5-year hell but...
THERE were times when the only way Bethany Haines felt she could deal with her grief was to replay the video in which her father was murdered. It was, she said, her only access to him, the most recent recording of his voice and depiction of his face.
‘There was this little nook between my bed and the wall – it was there I took my laptop and watched it over and over again.’
She added: ‘I would press play and shut my eyes and just listen to him.’
Of course, the words she heard him say were an abomination. They were scripted by the men who had captured him and now, moments before they beheaded him, he was forced to repeat them. ‘I would like to declare now I hold you, David Cameron, entirely responsible for my execution ...’ his daughter would hear him say.
Yet somehow, behind the horror and unspeakable wickedness, the Perthshire teenager found traces of comfort in seeing and hearing her father.
A crueller loss of a parent could scarcely be imagined. But the day on which her kidnapped father David Haines was murdered by a cell of four British Islamic terrorists in Syria in 2014 was only her first lesson on the cruelty of which others are capable.
For a year after he was murdered she received the same haunting messages online: ‘Ha ha, your dad is dead.’
A website in the US even went so far as to suggest she was an actress – while one of the wilder conspiracy theories suggested she was a fictional character created by enemies of Islamic State to drum up support for air strikes.
The truth was much more simple and obvious. Miss Haines was a teenager in agony, struggling to process the unprocessable. Her father, an aid worker motivated by kindness, had been beheaded by monsters who had filmed their appalling deed.
Little wonder, as the 20-year-old reflects this week on five years of torment, that the best fate she can imagine for the two remaining members of the cell which murdered her father and many others in the Syrian desert is a ‘long and slow and painful death’.
It was in March 2013, while he was working for a French aid organisation in Syria that Mr Haines was kidnapped, only ten days into his mission, along with Italian colleague Federico Motka.
While Mr Motka was freed two months later, the Briton was held for 17 months while, back in Perthshire, his ex-wife Louise and daughter were ordered by Foreign Office diplomats to keep the abduction a secret.
The stress of keeping the truth bottled up had a devastating effect on the teenager, then still at school, and she later admitted drinking and taking drugs to help her cope.
She recalled: ‘All my friends were dealing with normal problems, like boys or exams, while I was harbouring the secret that my dad had been kidnapped by Isis.
‘Everyone kept asking me why I was really down, so in the end I confided in a few close friends. Some refused to believe me, which was incredibly upsetting, but I suppose it did sound like something from a movie – this sort of thing wasn’t meant to happen in real life.’
The pain was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that her father had been living in Croatia with his second wife Dragana and their infant daughter Athea. She already missed him. Now he may never come home.
After a year-and-a-half of praying that he would, the news she had dreaded finally came. Miss Haines said later: ‘I was staying at my boyfriend’s house at the time. At 1am the police turned up with my mum, and her face was red from crying. When they told me about the video, it just didn’t sound real.
‘I was so traumatised I didn’t cry, scream or get angry. I hugged Mum, had a cup of tea and went back to bed. It was just too much to deal with and I felt as if my brain had switched off.’
A masked coward from Britain had committed the murder. He was called Mohammed Emwazi, went by the alias Jihadi John and he killed his helpless victims by decapitating them while they were on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs.
In the face of such evil, the numbness Miss Haines felt could not last long. ‘They [IS] need to be eradicated,’ she declared less than two weeks after her father’s death. ‘If air strikes or ground force is what it takes, then that’s what it takes.’ As for her father’s killer, she wanted to ‘see a bullet go through Jihadi John’s eyes’.
AND so the online abuse began as trolls who opposed air strikes lashed out. In her agony Miss Haines self-harmed and, at one stage, took a hammer to her room in a desperate bid for closure. Repainting it white, she stood in it and said out loud: ‘My Dad is never coming home.’ Finally the tears started to flow.
There was some comfort, at least, to be had in November 2015 when Emwazi was killed by a drone strike in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
His death was, of course, too easy but Miss Haines remembers feeling an ‘instant sense of relief’.
That same month, a second member of the cell, Aine Davis, was arrested in Turkey. After a trial he was jailed for seven-and-ahalf years. More comfort came from a growing friendship with Lucy Henning, whose father Alan, an aid worker, from Salford, was the next man the cell murdered.
Both teenagers when their fathers were killed, they were perhaps the only people alive who could understand exactly what the other was going through.
Now the two remaining terrorists, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, have finally been captured by Syrian Kurdish forces. Together with their accomplices – one dead, the other behind bars – they are reckoned to have beheaded at least 27 hostages and tortured many more.
Yesterday, from the 20-year-old whose world they shattered, there was both rancour and reflection.
Understandably, their ‘long, slow, painful deaths’ would please her. But she adds: ‘The best thing for them is to be locked up and throw away the key.’
‘If it goes to trial I will certainly be there. I will look them in the eye and let them know that I am who I am and they have destroyed a big part of my life.’
But they will know, too, that they have not destroyed Bethany Haines; that she will survive and endure while they face the consequences they so richly deserve.