Father of ISIS bride who fled Sydney to join ISIS called the Australian authorities but was told to call back in business hours
The father of an Australian jihadi bride has told how he tried to phone police after his daughter fled to join ISIS but was told to call back during business hours.
Sydney woman Janai Safar, 24, fled to Syria via Turkey with her cousin during a family holiday in Lebanon in 2015.
After discovering that both women were missing, Ms Safar’s father Samer said he called the Australian Federal Police in a panic, but was told to call back on Monday.
‘They said: ”We can’t help you.” I said: ”My daughter, she’s gone to Turkey and I’m worried” … They gave me a number … it just [said] ”sorry we’re open on Monday”,’ Mr Safar told The Australian.
When Mr Safar called the number he was given, no one answered the phone.
Ms Safar, a former nursing student, is now living in a Kurdish refugee camp in Roj, in northern Syria, with her two-year-old son Uthman.
She is one of the few defiant jihadi brides who have chosen to stay part of the Islamic State and has vowed never to return home to Australia where she says there are ‘naked women on the streets’.
An AFP spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia that they were not able to comment on individual cases.
‘In circumstances such as this, the AFP is unable to prevent people from travelling if they have a lawful and valid passport,’ he said.
‘The AFP will continue to work with its international partners with respect to the issue of Australians suspected of travelling to conflict zones.’
Mr Safar described ISIS members as ‘crazy’ and said his daughter is ‘stubborn’ but ‘kind-hearted’.
He said he has asked her to come home and she has refused.
‘She doesn’t want to show she’s fallen. But at the end of the day Australia is her country,’ he said.
More than 200 Australians are believed have fled to the so-called Islamic State since 2012.
During 2015 the AFP established an effective relationship with the Turkish authorities to stop the flow of Australians to Syria through Turkey, which became a well-trodden route to Islamic State.
Their operation was effective and they managed to apprehend more than 20 Australians en route, suggesting that if authorities had acted sooner they may have been able to stop Ms Safar at the border.
Ms Safar, who was tracked down by the Australian last week, insisted that she never trained or fought for ISIS but still fears she will be jailed if she ever came back to Australia.
She explained she and her cousin, who she only identified as Aylam, met their husbands in Raqqa between 2015 and 2017.
They made the decision to join the jihadi group after watching material online and ‘studying’ together and then fled without telling their families.
The two women are believed to have ties to ISIS commanders who were accused of plotting a bomb attack on an Australian flight in 2017.
Ms Safar revealed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade interviewed her on the two men’s involvement in the alleged plot which she said was ‘not true.’
She claimed her husband had never spoken about violence or terrorism, but said he did own weapons – as did ‘everyone’.
She did not go into further detail other than saying he was a Lebanese Australian who died in a car crash a year ago.
Ms Safar claimed that she, her cousin, and her cousin’s husband left the Islamic State after they were told to leave Raqqa during an attack in 2017.
They were caught by Kurdish officials and put in a refugee camp, while her cousin’s husband faces the death sentence in Baghdad.
When her husband was caught, Ms Safar said her cousin was sent back to the Islamic State for an exchange, and now believes she was killed in a bombing.
Ms Safar appears to be one of the few defiant jihadi brides who have chosen to stay as part of the Islamic State, while others have expressed regret in joining.
Teenage jihadi bride Zehra Duman, who fled Melbourne to fight with the Islamic State in Syria in 2014, is now begging to come home, claiming her two children have the right to be treated like any other ‘normal kids’ in Australia.
At the time Duman told Daily Mail Australia: ‘All you have to know is that the next time I will ever step into Australia, is when we come and make it a part of the Islamic State bi’thnillah.
In an interview with an American humanitarian worker, a woman who refused to confirm her identity but is believed to be Duman said: ‘I want to go back to my country.
‘I think everybody’s asking for that because I’m an Australian citizen.’
The mother-of-two young children said she understood Australians would be angry with her but insisted: ‘My kids have a right to be treated like normal kids.’
The defeat of ISIS last year has displaced thousands of jihadi brides, many of whom are now in refugee camps in Syria.
Duman, a former student at Isik College Keysborough, hit headlines in Australia when she fled in 2014 to marry Mahmoud Abullatif, a former Melbourne party boy-turned Muslim extremist.
When Abullatif died in battle five weeks after their wedding, Duman remarried and had two children with her second husband who also later died.
In 2015, a Twitter account believed to be run by her under the name Umm Abdullatif showed pictures of ISIS women carrying assault rifles and standing next to luxury cars.
In one tweet, Duman said: ‘US + Australia, how does it feel that all 5 of us were born n raised in your lands, & now here thirsty for ur blood?’
Photographs posted to a Twitter account believed to be hers showed several women standing under an Islamic State flag.
They reclined against a clean white BMW M5, wielding machine guns and dressed from head to toe in black Islamic dress.
Another image of five women standing under an Islamic State flag was captioned: ‘Can’t mess with my clique. From the land down under, to the land of Khilafah. Thats the Aussie spirit.’
Lisa Smith, a former Irish soldier who fled her country to become an ISIS bride revealed she wanted to return home this month.
The 37-year-old lost her husband and is currently living in the al-Hol refugee camp in Syria with her two-year-old daughter.
She fled the terror group’s last holdout in Baghouz and is one of hundreds of women and children at the camp.
Source: Daily Mail
