Sally Jones: UK punk singer who became leading Isis recruiter
Woman reportedly killed in US airstrike convinced hundreds of women to join her fighting for Islamic State
Photograph: The Guardian
Sally Jones converted to Islam and travelled to Syria in 2013.
Jones, a former singer and guitarist in an all-female 1990s punk band called Krunch, was born in Greenwich, south-east London, and later moved to Chatham, Kent.
She is believed to have been radicalised by her late husband, Junaid Hussain, who was British. After converting to Islam she travelled to Syria to join him in 2013.
Related: Islamic militant groups' recruits likely to be well educated, study finds
Tags
Who is online
93 visitors
Jones’s roots in suburban south-east England led her to be portrayed as an unlikely jihadist. But her background fits a profile of foreign fighters drawn up in a World Bank study which challenged assumptions that they come from deprived backgrounds. It found that the majority of Isis recruits are, like Jones, well educated and relatively wealthy .
Jones is believed to have recruited hundreds of extremists from the UK.
Last year she issued a series of specific terrorist threats, including calling on Muslim women to launch terrorist attacks in London, Glasgow, and Wales during Ramadan.
Citing Isis documents, the international Counter Extremism Project said she was responsible for training all European female recruits in tactics including suicide missions .
Jones used various social media accounts to recruit women to Isis and provided practical advice on how to travel to Syria. Typical comments include: “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa ... Come here I’ll do it for you.”
So twisted.
Recently the threat of terrorism in the U.K. has greatly increased:
Head of intelligence service says more attacks are inevitable as Britain sees ‘dramatic upshift’ in Islamist terrorism.
Britain is facing its most severe ever terrorist threat and fresh attacks in the country are inevitable, according to the head of Britain’s normally secretive domestic intelligence service in a rare public speech.
The spy chief said: “That threat is multi-dimensional, evolving rapidly and operating at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before.
This problem can only increase as the Social Networks such as Facebook keep allowing ISIS recruitment continue over the internet.
The internet is an amazing thing, but sometimes it is the worst thing that has happened in the world.