Former British Isis jihadi claims racism while growing up in London fuelled her radicalisation
'I was looking for a way to retaliate and I wanted honour again,' Tania Georgelas claims
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Your support makes all the difference.A British woman who travelled to join Isis in Syria with her children has claimed racism she experienced while growing up in London fuelled her radicalisation.
Tania Georgelas, born Joya Choudhury, married an extremist who went on to be one of the most senior Western members of Isis after reaching the group's territories.
Ms Georgelas, who was pregnant with her fourth child at the time, returned to Turkey with her three other children within months after they fell ill and has since publicly renounced extremism.
In an interview with The Atlantic from her current home in Texas, she said she was radicalised after her British Bangladeshi family were targeted by racists.
“Growing up in London was rough, I came from a very poor family,” she said. “We were second-generation immigrants and had faced a lot of racism.
“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 and I wanted honour again.”
Ms Georgelas was 14 during al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks and said she became “jihadi hardcore” shortly afterwards, while allegedly associating with a group of fundamentalist Algerians.
She met her future husband, American convert John Georgelas, on a Muslim matrimony website and they married in Rochdale when she was still a teenager.
Ms Georgelas said the pair discussed their shared passion for jihad during their online courtship and dreamed of having children to “train them to be assassins or soldiers”.
Their links to extremism were well-known by authorities, who jailed Georgelas in 2006 for providing IT assistance for a jihadi website and expressing his desire to support al-Qaeda online.
He was later freed and after moving between several towns in the UK and America, the family relocated to Egypt and socialised with a burgeoning circle of jihadis.
Georgelas, who used the name Yahya Abu Hassan, became a well-known extremist scholar and called for the establishment of an Islamist “caliphate” even before Isis staked its own claim.
He moved his family to the Syrian town of Azaz in 2013 but Ms Georgelas said she fled after she and her three children fell severely ill.
She has since moved to Texas and divorced her husband, who is believed to remain in Syria.
“I can’t help but love him. I don’t know how to make that feeling stop,” she added.
Ms Georgelas says she has also renounced Islam, joining a Christian Unitarian church and expressing a desire to help deradicalise returning Isis fighters.
Several former Isis fighters have blamed their radicalisation on grievances at home, including a lack of education or employment opportunities, poverty, racism or Islamophobia.
Research has indicated that many European jihadis joining the group in Syria and Iraq are from large families in deprived parts of cities where they were “isolated from mainstream social, economic and political activity”.
Analysts have warned that the agency of female Isis supporters has been underplayed using the reductive umbrella term “jihadi bride”.
While the group’s own guidance has traditionally emphasised restricted roles for women as mothers and wives obliged to support their husbands, an article released last month called on them to take up arms for the first time.
Following the declaration of the so-called Islamic State in 2014, the group produced a huge amount of propaganda seeking to attract Muslims with the promise of life free of supposed Western oppression, lived in comfort and peace.
Rose-tinted videos sought to present a utopian existence, showing smiling militants engaging in activities like bee-keeping, farming and even pizza-making as Western fighters used Twitter to broadcast images of palatial homes, swimming pools and expensive cars provided by the “caliphate”.
Among the propagandists was Georgelas, who also uses the name Yahya al-Bahrumi.
He was reportedly close to Isis’ late spokesman Abu Muhammed al-Adnani and contributed to English-language propaganda calling for supporters to travel to the group's territory and launch terror attacks.
His articles included one that declared communities minister Sajid Javid and former Tory party chair Baroness Warsi were on a “kill-list”.
Georgelas was last known to be in Raqqa but his whereabouts has been unknown since Isis’ de-facto capital was re-taken by US-backed forces.
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