Former Isis bride from London explains why she married senior jihadi: Racism fuelled my radicalisation

Former jihadi: Tania Georgelas
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Patrick Grafton-Green8 November 2017

A Harrow woman who married a senior Isis figure said that the only reason she had children was to raise them to become killers.

Mother-of-four Tania Georgelas, 33, added that the racism she was subjected to as a Londoner led to her becoming radicalised.

She said: “I've had these children for one reason only, and that was so they could serve god as Muslims, as mujahideen.”

In an interview with The Atlantic, she said she had “faced a lot of racism” during her upbringing, which fuelled her hatred for the West.

One of five children born in London to a British-Bangladeshi couple, she later travelled to Syria with her husband so their family could become terrorists.

London-born: Tania Georgelas moved to Syria with her family
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She said: “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.”

In her teens she became a prolific drug user and dropped out of school but it was while studying A-levels at a sixth form college in east London that her family believes she fell under the influence of a group of ultra-conservative Algerian students.

And after the September 11 terror attacks, when she was aged 17, she said she became “really jihadi hardcore”.

She said: “I saw the towers being crashed into and I went to school the next day.

“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.”

A few years later while attending a protest march against the Iraq war she was handed details of a Muslim matchmaking website.

She met her husband, John Georgelas, an American-born convert to Islam, through the website and the couple fell in love over discussions of jihad, marrying in 2004.

She said: “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.”

After settling in her husband's home town of Plano, Texas, the couple had four children, and travelled by bus with them to Syria in 2013.

They set up home in the abandoned villa of a Syrian general in the town of A’zaz but within months Ms Georgelas wanted to return home as her children became sick.

With the help of her husband's parents she made her way back to Plano, where she now lives.

She has since been granted a divorce and has returned to online dating, meeting Craig, an IT worker, within 24 hours on the site.

She said: “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.”

But she said she remains in love with her ex-husband, known in Isis as Yahya al-Bahrumi.

She claimed she has turned her back on Isis and that 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.”

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