One man’s mission to re women from clutches
DIANA Abbasi was like millions of other young women, with a wide circle of friends and passion for the latest fashions.
She studied hard, earned a degree in international relations at London South Bank University and dreamed of a career with a humanitarian organisation or the United Nations.
A devoted daughter of two Post Office workers who had come to Britain from Pakistan, the family observed Muslim customs without being strict and Diana wore a headscarf when she was around them.
But then her world was abruptly turned upside down.
In a drastic bid to avoid an arranged marriage, she gave up everything and travelled to Iraq to become one of a small band of British jihadi brides.
Here, in an exclusive extract from his new book, Operation Jihadi Bride: My Covert Mission to Rescue Young Women from ISIS, former soldier John Carney reveals her story, how he rescued her and her new life back home in Britain...
Diana had been led to believe the holiday with her two brothers had been arranged as a gift for her doing well in her degree.
What she had not imagined was their trip to Pakistan was to introduce her to her future husband, a distant cousin from the rural village.
Malik was twice her age. He had yellow teeth and didn’t speak a word of English.
As Diana gazed at Malik across the room, her world fell apart.
When they returned to London, Diana couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. She cried bitter tears. She tried to reason with her parents but a wall had grown up between them. They had allowed her the freedom to go to university. That was enough.
After 30 years in England her parents were outwardly liberal, assimilated, but their mentality remained in the Hunza Valley.
Diana wanted to run away, but to where, with whom? Her education had all been for nothing.
She went on line and watched documentaries made in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. She wept over photographs of children with missing limbs in shattered hospitals.
Diana had lived obliviously in London while people like her were fleeing their homes from firebombs, shelling, drone attacks and barrel bombs.
She found her way to a chat room where she made friends with a woman her own age named Eva, a British-born Muslim who had fled to the ISIS caliphate.
As she and Eva talked through the night on Skype, Diana felt uplifted, inspired, needed. Eva offered an alternative, the chance to really find herself.
When she woke the following morning, the knots in her stomach had untied.
Diana took her savings from the bank. John Carney risked life to save women She found her passport in a drawer and crept out of the house before daybreak, dressed the way she always had.
She had a one-way ticket on the Eurostar from St Pancras to the Gare du Nord. In Paris, she caught the Deutsche Bahn for Stuttgart and Budapest, where she changed trains for Istanbul. No one asked any questions. Why would they?
People had tracked her journey. Two lads were waiting for her at the station in Istanbul. They drove her to the city’s smuggling hub in Aksaray. There she joined several other girls in a Volkswagen panel van that took them across country to an unguarded spot in the razor-wire fence dividing Turkey from Syria.
She changed from blue jeans into a long black abaya with a full-face niqab.
She knew before she reached Mosul that it had all been a terrible mistake. Every girl who travelled to the caliphate and married a jihadi had their own story, but at the heart of each one was the culture clash between their daily life and experiences in Europe and the demands of Islam.
It was nine months later when I spoke to Roy Underwood a contact in Mosul, Iraq.
“There’s a girl here, Sophian. Australian. She’s got a baby and wants out, like yesterday…”
“Can we get to her?”
“I told her to wait till we were liberated by you guys. But the baby needs treatment for something or other.
“Hey, man,” he said, like Jihadists in 2014 after claiming to have taken control of army checkpoint in Salahuddin it was an afterthought. “Hope you’ve got room for another one?”
“Another what?”
“Another girl. She’s already tried to get out once. She’s dead keen to have another go.” “More the merrier, mate,” I told him. I spotted Roy, hands behind his back. His faint nod said he had recognized me.
He strode through the throng. Two women in black, one with a baby, bobbed along submissively in his wake. He opened the sliding rear door and waved his hand dismissively as they climbed in. He snapped the door shut.
Some men risk their lives to save unknown babies. Some men throw live babies into burning pits with their dead mothers. British intelligence would tell me that anyone who had joined Islamic State was considered an e should be executed tarian organisations people home to programmes and fai
A fresh fusillade o
Maske