The woman who defied Isis

Ellise Campbell remembers well the day Isis seized Mosul. The 64-year-old British-born grandmother had been living there since 2003: she is married to an Iraqi engineer, and was helping to run an English language school. Then in June 2014, Isis militants took power. “It was a hazy day, all clouds and no sun, almost as if the sky was crying,” she told Josie Ensor in The Sunday Telegraph. “By 5am the next day, the black flag of Isis was flying over the city.”

Although she had converted to Islam in the 1980s, Campbell assumed she would be an obvious target for the jihadis. But they allowed her to keep teaching, and even asked her to do an evening course for their fighters. “I had to be careful what I said – you cannot say no to them. But I made the excuse that I was too old to be working late at night, and they accepted that.” She also refused to swear allegiance to Isis. “I think with age comes power,” she reflects. “I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to speak back to them at 34, but at 64 I have no fear.” The jihadis seemed to sense this. “You wouldn’t think it, but being British, and my age, gained me some respect with Isis.”

Even so, living under their violent interpretation of Islam was hell. “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… You can never truly understand how barbaric these people were unless you lived under them. They were devils.” Then, when the Iraqi army finally resolved to drive Isis out, Campbell had to endure eight months under bombardment. Her house has been destroyed, and she now lives with her son in the city of Duhok. Yet she remains philosophical. “When you accept Allah, he guides you through the good times and the bad. There have been mostly bad times,” she laughs. “But I’m a survivor.”