A woman who was forcibly smuggled into Isis-held Syria by her husband has described the horrors of the caliphate and told of the British jihadists she met there.
Islam Mitat, 23, had been married to her husband, Ahmed, for just three months when he announced he wanted them to move from Dubai to Turkey, according to a report in The Times.
The woman, who was just 20 at the time, was waiting for documents to allow her to live in Britain, but agreed, only for her husband to take her to Syria after they arrived in Istanbul.
She told the newspaper of how she berated her husband. “I told him, all our time together is just lies,” she said.
“I just wanted to have a normal life with my husband and my kids. That is the problem with us women. We trust men too much.”
Mitat told of how she believed that they would never make it across the border, and would be saved, but was instead raced over into the war-torn country amid gunfire.
She was forced to set up life Raqqa, part of the so-called caliphate, where she met notorious British-born supporters of Isis in ‘Little Britain’.
Among her neighbours were sister Zahra and Salma Halane, known as the ‘Terror Twins’ — siblings who had run away from their Manchester home earlier in 2014.
“I didn’t even know what Isis was,” she said. “Then I realised these are the famous people. They are on the news.”
Sally Jones, the former punk singer from Kent, who is known as the White Widow, also came round for tea, she said, as did the three Bethnal Green schoolgirls who ran away to Syria in 2015.
There was also 15-year-old Yusra Hussien, from Bristol, and London-born Muslim convert Grace Dare and her Swedish husband, known as Abu Bakr.
Abu Bakr’s son, who played in Mitat’s living room, was seen in a video on the internet last year detonating a car bomb, reportedly killing four people.
She also later met Aine Davis, the London-born jihadist who was one of four Britons known as the Beatles, along with Jihadi John.
In 2015, he was arrested and imprisoned in Turkey over terrorist offences. Mohammed Emwazi (Jihadi John) was killed in a drone strike in November that year.
Mitat, who learnt English from the British Isis fighters she met, fell pregnant by her husband, who was killed just two months after they arrived.
She then lived in her sister-in-law Salma’s house, which had become the epicentre of the British jihadist social scene, according to The Times.
She told of how she planned to escape, but was forced to marry another Isis fighter, who she was later able to divorce.
Back in Raqqa, she discovered another horrifying truth: that women from the Yazidi religious minority were being held as sex slaves.
“The wives hated the sex slaves. For the fighters, they were a bit of fun – to be played with and used,” she said.
Slowly, Mitat hatched a plan to escape by befriending Syrian neighbour, who at first distrusted her, believing her to be a supporter of Isis.
Mitat was impregnated and had a second child with her new husband, who was wounded fighting for Isis shortly afterwards.
She described how, on the rare occasion she would venture into Raqqa to buy supplies, she would see mutilated corpses hung up on display in a square.
Eventually, after winning the trust of her Syrian neighbours, she managed to escape over the border with a Yazidi friend, disguising the outing as a wedding visit.
The pair made it over the border with relative ease, but then, with the help of a paid smuggler, had to walk through a minefield with their young children.
Eventually, reached The People’s Protection Units, a mainly-Kurdish militia in Syria.
“I was so happy,” she said. “Imagine: for three years it was dark, like in a cave. Now it’s light.”
Mitat has said she has been co-operating with British intelligence, providing information about her time living under Isis, but is currently in limbo and without state.
“I never supported Isis,” she said. “Never. All I want is something better for me and my children. I just want to live again.”
