‘Isil wanted me, a Briton in Mosul, to teach its fighters English. I said no’

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

The 64-year-old British-born 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.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) asked her many times to pledge allegiance to the terror group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but on each occasion she refused.

“You wouldn’t think it, but being British, and my age, gained me some respect with Isil,” 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-of-three told The Sunday Telegraph how she outwitted Isil commanders during the three years she lived under the Islamist group’s capricious and violent rule.

Before Isil’s arrival in Iraq’s second city in June 2014, she helped run an English language institute called the Oxford Centre. Isil insisted she change its name to an Arabic one but, surprisingly, allowed her to carry on teaching.

She says every day Isil 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 even tried to recruit her to help teach English to their fighters.

“They approached me one day and said they would bring 20-30 highranking 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.

“The Arab leaders treated me well, but the Chechen ones would tell me I was speaking the language of infidels, so I would say back, ‘Isn’t Russian also the language of the kuffar (nonbelievers)?’, to which they didn’t have an answer. They just said, ‘Don’t you know who you’re speaking to?’”

Residents of Mosul have been killed for much less during Isil’s brutal threeyear rule over the city but, in the first year at least, she managed to reach an unusual understanding with the group.

“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 now-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. “There wasn’t any pressure – it just felt right as I had studied the religion and it spoke to me,” she says.

She has since taken her husband’s surname and chosen a Muslim first name. To protect her new identity, however, she asked that The Sunday Telegraph use the pseudonym Nour Abdullah.

The couple moved to Mosul in 2003, although things grew more conservative after 2006 when Isil’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, established a foothold in the city.

But everything changed in 2014 with the arrival of Isil. “On June 9, I remember it well, the militants arrived in our city. It was a hazy day – all clouds and no sun, almost as if the sky was crying,” she says. “By 5am the next day, the black flag of Isis, Daesh, Isil, IS, or whatever you want to call it, was flying over the city. The army had withdrawn; we were alone, under the control of a hardline terrorist group. We had been betrayed by the government.”

She says she researched Isil online in an effort to understand the city’s new rulers. “They had a very alluring propaganda machine,” she says. “Honestly, it was very magnetic.”

The first year under Isil was not so bad, she says. But Mrs Abdullah, who describes herself as a conservative Muslim, would be shocked by the jihadists’ use of extreme violence and perverted interpretation of Islam. “The things that went on in the city shocked me to my core. Isis 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 Isis.

“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 $600 (£470) each to a smuggler to escape. Mrs Abdullah, who has pain in her hips and cannot walk far, had little option but to stay. After that, Isil erected more checkpoints and her life became one of crippling repression. She could only leave the house to go to the market or to work, and only if accompanied by a male relative.

She commuted to the institute across a bridge over the Tigris river, which she says was the most terrifying part of her day. “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 Isil fighters.”

Mrs Abdullah lived in a relatively wealthy area of west Mosul, which attracted many senior foreign fighters. They took over the houses of Christians, most of whom had fled. 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 and walked among some of the most notorious western jihadists. She says the foreigners were treated “like Gods”, but were the cruellest to civilians. “There are more British fighters than they [the security services] know about,” she adds. “I often heard British speakers of English.”

On two occasions she even saw John Cantlie, the British journalist who has been held by Isil for more than four years and who appears every few months in its propaganda videos.

She says the last eight months, when the Iraqi army’s offensive to liberate Mosul started, were an indescribable hell. She spent eight days hiding in a neighbour’s basement. She knitted to pass the time. Now, with her home in Mosul uninhabitable, she has moved in with one of her sons in Duhok.

“When you accept Allah, he guides you through the good times and the bad. But there have been mostly bad times,” she laughs. “But I’m a survivor.”

‘You can never understand how barbaric these people were unless you lived under them. They were devils’