Former IS recruiter begs to return home
AN Islamic State recruiter who fled London begged to be allowed home yesterday.
Tooba Gondal, 25, a former student at Goldsmiths, University of London, travelled from Walthamstow, east London, to Syria in 2015.
From the terrorist group’s capital of Raqqa, she glorified the brutal regime and lured British girls to be ‘jihadi brides’. It is thought London schoolgirl Shamima Begum was among her recruits.
She wed three IS fighters, all of whom were killed.
As IS lost ground, Gondal – who now calls herself Umm Muthanna Al Britaniyah – was sent in April to the Ain Issa camp in northern Syria with her two young children, daughter Asiya, 1 months, and son Ibrahim, two, after trying to flee.
In a letter published by The Sunday Times yesterday, she appealed to be let back into Britain, despite once calling it a ‘filthy country’.
She said: ‘I am not a terrorist. I have never harmed you, nor do I intend to. I want to prove I am a changed person; a much better individual for society. I want to face justice in a British court. I wish to redeem myself.’
Gondal has been banned from re-entering the UK by a Home Office exclusion order. But she says her second husband – Ibrahim’s father – was British, which she believes gives her grounds to return.