Mum-of-five Tania Choudhury has detailed her disturbing radicalisation alongside top militant commander John Georgelas after the September 11 attack on New York’s Twin Towers
The British former wife of America’s most senior ISIS terrorist has told how the only reason she had children was to raise them to become killers.
Tania Choudhury detailed her radicalisation into “jihadi hardcore” after the September 11 attack on New York’s Twin Towers in 2001.
The mum-of-five revealed how her dream for her children with her now ex-husband, John Georgelas, was for them to become terrorists.
Speaking from the security of her new life in Plano, Texas, the 33-year-old said: “I’ve had these children for one reason only, and that was so they could serve God as Muslims, as mujahideen.”
Opening up about her former husband, who has risen to become one of ISIS’s main commanders in Syria, Choudhury spoke of their life together before their divorce.
“Our dreams were to have land of our own, raise a family and train them to be assassins or whatever, soldiers, and then eventually go join the jihad,” she said of Georgelas, an American-born convert to Islam.
One of five children born in London to British-Bangladeshi couple Nural and Jahanara Choudhury, she told how she became radicalised and sought revenge on the west after 9/11.
“I faced a lot of racism,” she says of her childhood in Harrow.
“We had bad neighbours, they would smash our windows, but generally I just felt like an outsider.
“I was looking for a way to retaliate.”
Choudhury said the turning point in her radicalisation came when she was a teenager after seeing thousands die in the Twin Towers.
“I was 17, I saw the towers being crashed into and I went to school the next day,” she said.
“I said to my friend, ‘Oh isn’t it dreadful what happened,’ and she looked at me and said ‘Is it really?’
“At that point, I became really jihadi hardcore.”
Several years while attending a protest march against the Iraq war she was handed details of a Muslim matchmaking website.
After joining she was contacted by Georgelas, the youngest child and only son of former US military doctor Colonel Timothy Georgelas and his wife Martha.
Growing up in Plano, Texas, Georgelas, now 44, reportedly rebelled as a teenager, becoming a prolific drug user, dropping out of school and converting to Islam shortly after 9/11.
The couple fell in love over internet discussions of jihad and dreams of a caliphate.
During her interview with The Atlantic, the couple were said to have “fantasized about becoming a family of itinerant holy warriors, a sort of Islamic version of the Von Trapps, substituting slaughter of infidels for Alpine show tunes”.
After falling pregnant in early October 2004, the couple wed at the Gothic town hall in Rochdale, Lancashire.
By the time they had had three children and another on the way, in 2013, they began discussing joining ISIS in Syria.
“John wanted to go to Syria, and I said I wasn’t ready, not while the kids are small,” she recalled.
In August 2013, the family travelled to Syria by bus, setting up home in the abandoned villa of a Syrian general in the town of A’zaz but within months Choudhury wanted out as she and the children became sick.
Making her way back through Turkey, her husband’s parents ensured she had safe passage to Plano where she now lives.
After being granted a divorce she is now dating Craig, an IT worker, after returning to online dating.
“I went to the dating website Match, I wrote an essay: “I have four kids, my husband abandoned me to go become the next Osama Bin Ladin”. I got 1,300 replies.”
Of her former husband, known in ISIS as Yahya al-Bahrumi,, she said: “He thought what he was doing was for the greater good.
“I can’t help but love him. I don’t know how to make that feeling stop.”
Choudhury claims she has turned her back on ISIS saying she is reformed.
Graeme Wood, an ISIS expert, who interviewed her said: “She never, in my conversations with her, advocated violence or seriously regretted leaving John at the Syrian border.
“And yet there are signs - not of violence, but of a permanent effect of her jihadist brainwashing.”
Source : mirror.co.uk
