ISIS’ British ‘matchmaker’
British mother-of-one Tooba Gondal, 25, moved to London as a child and had previously claimed that she had permanent British residence but the Home Office issued her with an exclusion order last November, which bars her from ever returning to the UK.
The mother-of-two studied at Goldsmith’s University in London and is accused of acting as a ‘matchmaker’, allegedly arranging marriages for members including ISIS bride Shamima Begum.
Gondal was born in France but moved to London as a child and previously held British residency.
She lived in Britain before joining ISIS in 2015 and is believed to have recruited several teenage women. She is banned from re-entering Britain.
The 25-year-old is accused of being one of the top recruiters of females to the ranks of ISIS.
Known as a ‘matchmaker’, she allegedly arranged the marriage of Shamima Begum who fled her Bethnal Green home for Syria in 2015.
In October, Gondal wrote an open letter to the Sunday Times from the Ain Issa camp in Raqaa, northern Syria.
‘I desperately wish for the British government to take us back. I want to prove that I am a changed person; a much better individual for society. I offer to help prevent vulnerable Muslims from being targeted and radicalised,’ she said.
Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria caused chaos and she was able to escape into Turkey, where she was later arrested.
Gondal’s son Ibrahim is entitled to British citizenship because his father – who was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq – was from the UK.
‘Sid Vicious’
Hindu-born Londoner Siddhartha Dhar, 32, was known as ‘Sid’ to friends and enjoyed drinking, would take girls to his favourite action movies and dreamed of being an NHS dentist.
MI6 and foreign secret services are now trying to work out if he is the new Jihadi John – and has already earned the nicknames ‘Sid Vicious’ and ‘Jihadi Sid’.
Dhar’s family say he was a ‘sensitive boy’ who ‘changed’ as a teenager after the death of his father and converted to Islam, shunning TV and music, sleeping on the floor and even telling his mother he couldn’t love her anymore because she is not a Muslim.
He stopped studying and rented bouncy castles for children’s parties while supporting banned militant group Al-Muhajiroun and running ‘roadshows’ aimed at attracting troubled youngsters in inner-cities.
Dhar then wrote ISIS’ 46-page guide to life in the caliphate promising a holiday lifestyle with home comforts.
He said the Islamic State was like a ‘plush Mediterranean resort’ with British chocolate like Kit Kats, Bounty bars and Snickers freely available ‘and the best lattes and cappuccinos around.’
After Jihadi John was eviscerated in a drone attack it was rumoured that Dhar took over as executioner in chief. He has at least one son.
Jihadi Jack
Once Jack Letts had travelled to Syria, he became almost unrecognisable from the soccer-mad boy who used to sleep with his football.
The elder of Sally Lane and John Letts’s two sons, Jack struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder and Tourette’s at school, jurors were told.
His British-Canadian father described him as a ‘personable’ young man who was ‘engaging and humorous’.
His friend, Anwar Belhimer, told his father he had been saying ‘worrying things’ and urged him to confiscate his passport.
But at the age of 18, his parents supported his decision to study Arabic abroad and he set off for Jordan and Kuwait.
From there, he married an Iraqi woman named Asmaa and they had a son Muhammed.
Despite warning signs, Lane was horrified when he told her he was in Syria in September 2014.
He was probably helped to travel to Islamic State territory by a group of fighters from Portsmouth.
He has spent the last two years in a prison in Kurdish-held Rojava, in northern Syria.
The British Government has said it has no consular assistance in the region.
Meanwhile, in a phone voicemail to a BBC journalist, Jack appeared not to support their unstinting efforts.
Despite his parents’ high profile campaign for his return, he told a BBC reporter: ‘To be honest the whole idea of putting pressure on the British Government to come and save me is not something I wanted to do or something I thought was clever.’
The caliphate’s gravedigger
Father-of-five Shahan Choudhury, 32, from London, was one of ISIS’ gravedigger who buried fighters during the caliphate’s last stand.
He was a former suspect in a gang murder before he fled to Syria in 2014 – after being radicalised in what is allegedly one of Britain’s most secure prisons.
Shahan Choudhury, 30, vanished from his flat in London last year and has since used Twitter to urge other British Muslims to carry out terror attacks in the UK.
His family say he was ‘brainwashed’ after spending 18 months on remand in HMP Belmarsh for allegedly taking part in the stabbing of a 17-year-old.
He was acquitted in 2007 but his family believe he was ‘brainwashed’ by Islamic extremists at HMP Belmarsh.
As soon as he was released he joined the banned al-Muhajiroun (ALM), the hate group led by Anjem Choudary which has called for the implementation of Sharia Law in the U.K.
A relative said: ‘He was just like any other western kid when he went in but by the time he came out he was going on about religion and how the kuffar [non-believers] would all end up in hellfire.’
‘Hungry Hamza’
26-year-old west Londoner Hamza Parvez – the first known British man to have joined the group in Iraq who was captured by Kurdish-led forces outside the group’s final stronghold in Banghouz, in April last year.
He was dubbed ‘Hungry Hamza’ because he repeatedly tweeted about loving life with ISIS – but then moaned about how much he missed KFC, Nando’s and McDonald’s dinners.
He was used by ISIS to tweet about the food available in the caliphate including ice cream and hailed life there as the ‘golden age of jihad’.
But as it collapsed a lack of fast food meant he lost 30 kilos and was last seen languishing in a jail on the Syrian border with Turkey.
The 26-year-old left his home in west London to join the terror group, but after he surrendered to Kurdish forces he claimed he did not realise ISIS were so bad when he went to join up.
Cardiff’s ice cream jihadi
A British ice cream seller who went to join ISIS in Syria five years ago has pleaded to come home because he misses his mother and his life in Cardiff.
Aseel Muthana left Wales for Syria in February 2014, aged 17, following his brother Nasser and another friend in joining the jihadist group.
His family feared he had died but Muthana has now resurfaced at a prison camp in northern Syria and his mother has backed his plea to come home.
Speaking to ITV News from the prison, Muthana, now 22, claimed he had merely wanted to ‘help the poor’ when he travelled to Syria.
The wave of widely publicised ISIS beheadings began later in 2014, when journalist James Foley and British aid worker David Haines were among numerous people murdered in propaganda videos broadcast by the terror group.
However, ISIS had its roots in extremist groups which had been using beheadings during the war in Iraq well before that.
Begging to come home, Muthana said he missed his mother Umm Amin and his former life in the Welsh capital where he worked selling ice cream.
The fate of his brother Nasser remains unclear while his friend Reeyad Khan was killed by a drone strike in 2015.