Terrorist who took his pregnant wife to Syria was radicalised in UK
Extremist on US’s ‘kill list’ persuaded her to join IS
ONE of the world’s most wanted terrorists was radicalised in the UK before persuading his pregnant British wife to travel to Syria and join IS.
American convert John Georgelas, who is the terror group’s most senior westerner, met Joya Choudhury online and married her at Rochdale’s town hall in Lancashire in 2004.
Nearly a decade later, the couple – who were said to be radicalised by British preachers – travelled to Syria with their three young sons to join Islamic State.
But after just one month, a heavily-pregnant Choudhury fled the warzone with children in tow and divorced her husband a year later.
Despite being born into a distinguished military family, Georgelas, 33, converted to Islam shortly after
‘On Pentagon’s kill list’
9/11 and is now ranked among the upper echelons of the terror group. His extreme views are understood to have been fuelled in part when he was exposed as a young man to radical British preachers in the muchcriticised ‘Londonistan’ scene.
Now going by the name Yahya Abu Hassan, he is believed to be on the Pentagon’s ‘kill list’ after becoming instrumental in recruiting westerners to the terror group.
According to The Sunday Times, he met Choudhury on a Muslim dating website when they were both 19 in early 2003 and flew over from his hometown in Texas to join her. Her middleclass parents, who had emigrated from Bangladesh to London, were said to be furious after they exchanged Islamic vows in secret, and later ostracised her from the family.
Growing up in London, Choudhury was known to friends as Tania. They said she smoked cannabis and showed little interest in religion.
But she is understood to have turned to religion during her A-levels and began wearing a jilbab, a full robe that leaves only the face uncovered, while also accusing her parents of not giving her a name that sounded Muslim enough. In 2004, she married Georgelas – whose father was a doctor in the US Air Force who retired with the rank of colonel – while pregnant with their first child.
The cash-strapped couple later moved to America, where Georgelas served a prison sentence and married a second wife.
Choudhury stayed with her husband and was persuaded in 2013 to take the family to join IS in Syria. But after only a month, she wanted to leave and her husband arranged for her family to be secretly taken to Turkey so she could return home.
She has since moved back to the US and is seen dressing in conventional Western clothing, describing herself on social media as a ‘Left-wing libertarian and spiritual seeker’.
At the end of 2014, she filed for divorce from Georgelas in the US courts. The children are understood to live with her in-laws and she has access to them at weekends – but there are said to be ‘concerns’ over what the youngsters have ‘been exposed to’.
Meanwhile, Georgelas has risen up the ranks in IS and has become a propaganda chief, tasked with luring recruits from English-speaking countries.
He is said to have been one of the first people to call for the terror group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to declare a caliphate in the Middle East. He is also understood to have been close to the group’s external operations chief, Abu Muhammad AlAdnani, who was behind the Paris and Brussels massacres.
In an article published last year, Georgelas called for supporters who are ‘behind enemy lines’ to carry out lone wolf attacks in their own countries.
He wrote: ‘If you can obtain a weapon, do so and use it as soon as possible.’
More than 800 British Muslims are thought to have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join terror groups, with at least 100 believed to be women or girls.
Last night, Joya Choudhury’s family refused to talk about their daughter.
Speaking outside their terraced house in Barking, Essex, her mother Jahanara Choudhury said: ‘No, no. I don’t want to talk about this.’