Jihadi bride who fled Sydney to join ISIS says she won’t return home because there are naked women on the streets
An Australian woman who left the country to join ISIS in Syria has revealed she doesn’t regret living under the Islamic State and has no plans to return to home.
Janai Safar, 24, vowed never to return to Australia where she says there are ‘naked women on the streets’ and she could face ten years in jail.
The mother-of-one, who was a nursing student in Sydney before leaving the country in 2015, was tracked down and interviewed by The Australian on Monday in Kurdish refugee camp Roj in northern Syria.
She told the publication she refuses to raise her son, two-year-old Uthman, in a non-Islamic country and fears he could be taken away from her if she returned.
‘It was my decision to come here to go away from where women are naked on the street. I don’t want my son to be raised around that,’ she said.
‘I don’t regret coming to Syria. I don’t regret living under Islamic State.’
She insisted she never trained or fought but simply acted as a housewife to her jihadi husband – but fears she will be jailed if she ever came back to Australia.
Ms Safar 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 had died in a car crash a year ago.
Ms Safar revealed 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’s father, Samer, who described ISIS members as ‘crazy,’ 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 told The Australian.
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.
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.
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.
Hundreds of babies have died and the woman said her two-year-old son and six-month-old daughter are sick and malnourished.
‘I have no money, I’m not allowed to have money, they don’t give us food here and they don’t let us contact our families,’ she said in a video at Al Hawl refugee camp that was sent to the ABC.
‘I understand the anger that they have towards a lot of us here, but the kids don’t need to suffer.’
The woman, 24, claimed she has been trying to leave ISIS for two years but could not because she had no money and would get killed if she were caught.
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.
Her father, Davut Duman, said his daughter, who became a successful ISIS recruiter, had been ‘brainwashed’ and that he desperately wanted her home.
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.
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?’
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.’
Source: Daily Mail
