The white widow:
“good riddance”
On paper, Sally Jones made an unlikely jihadi, said Fiona Hamilton in The Times. A mother of two from Kent, she once sang in a punk band and worked as a beautician. But her life took a drastic turn in 2013, when she travelled to Syria with her younger son Jojo, then nine, to marry Junaid Hussain, an Islamist hacker from Birmingham whom she’d met online. Jones quickly gained a name for herself in Raqqa, the then capital of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate, as a propagandist and recruiter of jihadi brides. Dubbed “the white widow” after a US drone killed her husband in 2015, she vowed to fight the UK “until my last breath”. That moment, it emerged last week, almost certainly came in June, when a US drone is believed to have killed her – and probably her son – as they fled Raqqa.
The death of “the world’s most wanted female terrorist” is welcome news, said the Daily Mail. Jones was linked to several failed Isis plots, including one to target the Queen during the VJ Day celebrations in London in 2015. She published online the names of 1,300 US armed forces personnel, many of whom were serving in UK air bases, that her husband had hacked. She tweeted about wanting to behead Christians with a “blunt knife”, and allegedly let her son serve as an executioner in Isis propaganda videos. There were recent rumours that Jones had wanted to return to the UK, but was stopped by her Isis comrades and the “impassioned pleas” of her brainwashed son.
Jones “had little tactical value” to Isis on the battlefield, said Harry Cockburn in The Independent, but her loss is a significant propaganda setback for the organisation. She became “something of an icon for the group – a symbol of how [Isis] could influence women from foreign countries”. Jones was certainly a gifted propagandist, said Sufiya Ahmed in the same paper. She used a number of Twitter accounts to lure Western teenagers to Syria, using images such as the one in which her face was superimposed onto a picture of a nun with a gun, to lend a spurious glamour to her life of violence. The general attitude to Jones’s passing is: “good riddance”. But British Muslim women who feared that their own daughters might fall under this woman’s spell are breathing a particular “sigh of relief”.