Tania Georgelas has detailed her radicalisation and her ultimate split with her jihadi husband. Photo / Facebook
Tania Georgelas has detailed her radicalisation and her ultimate split with her jihadi husband. Photo / Facebook
The British-born jihadi bride who was married to the most senior American member of Isis has spoken out, revealing her new life as a suburban mom in Dallas.
Tania Georgelas, 33, detailed her radicalisation, her dream for her children to become terrorists and the ultimate split with her jihadi husband in a new interview with The Atlantic.
"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 her ex-husband John Georgelas, an American-born convert to Islam who has risen to the upper ranks of Isis, the Daily Mail reported.
From the comfort of her new life on the northern outskirts of Dallas, where she lives with John's wealthy parents and attends a Unitarian church with her IT programmer boyfriend Craig, Tania described the extraordinary journey that took her from England to Syria, and finally America.
She is one of five children born in London to British-Bangladeshi couple Nural and Jahanara Choudhury.
"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," she said.
Tania said the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were a turning point for her radicalisation.
"I was 17, I saw the towers being crashed into and I went to school the next day," she recalled. "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," she said.
John Georgelas is an American-born convert to Islam who has risen to the upper ranks of Isis.
A few years later, she was at a protest against the Iraq war when she says Muslim men were handing out slips of paper, with the address of a Muslim matchmaking website written on them.
Through the website, she met John Georgelas, the youngest child and only son of former US military doctor Colonel Timothy Georgelas and his wife Martha.
Growing up in Plano, Texas, John is said to have 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 discussions of jihad and dreams of a caliphate: a match made in hell.
Tania was heavily pregnant when the pair wed in a civil ceremony in October 2004 at the Gothic town hall in Rochdale, England.
They'd had three children and another on the way when, 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 recalls.
But they did go, even though Tania was some five months pregnant, and they brought along their young children.
"I've had these children for one reason only, and that was so they could serve God as Muslims, as mujahideen," she recalls.
In August 2013, the family traveled to Syria by bus, setting up home in the abandoned villa of a Syrian general in the town of A'zaz. There were no windows, no running water and only a meagre supply of food. Within days, Tania and the children became ill with vomiting bugs and infections.
Astonishingly, given what is known about the way Isis treats those who turn their back on it, John agreed to his wife's demands to leave.
Tania Georgelas started online dating when she returned to the United States. Photo / Facebook
With the help of John's parents, she made her way back to Texas with the children, and sought and obtained a divorce from him. He remains in Syria to this day, where he has become the highest ranking American in Isis.
Single in a new city, Tania returned to the world of 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 Laden'. I got 1300 replies."
She met her new beau Craig, an IT worker, within 24 hours on the site.
"She told me pretty much from about the first phone call," Craig recalled. "She said right away that her husband was in IS, and I said 'Okay, that's alright'."
Craig, originally from Minnesota, introduced Tania to the wine bars and bistros of the north Dallas suburbs, and the pair quickly became a couple.
They now attend a Unitarian church together, and Tania says she'd like to work for a de-radicalisation program that could help former terrorists.
"A lot of people see me as someone very unlucky, but I see the glass half full," she said.
"I'm alive, I got out of Syria and my children are happy, healthy and smart. I'm content."
In January, Daily Mail reported that there were some questions around just how completely Tania had severed ties with her former husband and his radical ideology.
After fleeing Syria, she has visited a social networking site used by her husband to post his extremist articles and 'liked' a final post made before the site was closed down.
Tania Georgelas has detailed her radicalisation and her ultimate split with her jihadi husband. Photo / Facebook
And, as she wrote in one of her Facebook posts: "I'm still so in-love with Ioannis... Nonetheless I'm tired of being pushed over the edge by him, and being told: 'Tania, you're a strong woman! Pick yourself up so I can push you over again!' I want my husband back but not on those terms."
Atlantic reporter Graeme Wood, an Isis expert, wrote that in his interviews with Tania, she seemed genuinely reformed.
"She never, in my conversations with her, advocated violence or seriously regretted leaving John at the Syrian border," Wood wrote.
"And yet there are signs - not of violence, but of a permanent effect of her jihadist brainwashing," he continued, pointing to an offhand comment Tania had made that Shiite Muslims are "not really Muslim" and a casual characterisation of Isis followers as just wanting "to live under a caliphate".
Of her former husband, who seems destined to die for his vision of a Muslim caliphate as Isis makes its final stand on dwindling territory, Tania says: "He thought what he was doing was for the greater good."
