With her glossy, dark hair and sky-high heels, there is little to set Tania Joya apart from the glamorous Texan women who file into the First Unitarian Church of Dallas each Sunday
With her glossy, dark hair and sky-high heels, there is little to set Tania Joya apart from the glamorous Texan women who file into the First Unitarian Church of Dallas each Sunday.
Sitting at her side in the pew, his arm draped protectively around her shoulder, is her wealthy, besotted fiancé. On her engagement finger, the flashy diamond ring he bought her.
But if this British mother-of-four appears to be embracing the American dream, then her glitzy new life in the U.S. belies the extraordinary and sinister past she has left behind.
Tania is the ex-wife of one of ISIS’s most senior commanders, a U.S.-born white Muslim convert she met online. She was a passionate espouser of the jihadi cause until she fled Syria with her children four years ago.
Since then, the 33-year-old daughter of a postmaster has pulled off a remarkable metamorphosis, effortlessly transforming herself from Islamic extremist to suburban American housewife.
But over the past week, Tania appears to have taken her campaign to repackage what she calls ‘my crazy whirlwind story’ even further, telling two carefully selected U.S. media outlets about the horrors of growing up in the UK and blaming the racism she claims to have suffered here, for driving her into the arms of Islamic extremism.
Her portrayal of the events that followed could have come straight out of a Hollywood studio — the climax of her story coming at the moment she found herself, five months pregnant and leaking amniotic fluid, staggering through a minefield and dodging snipers’ bullets as she and her three sons fled across the border from Syria into Turkey in 2013.
‘I was living in a horror movie that wasn’t ending,’ she says in a short film entitled The First Lady of ISIS which appears on the website of The Atlantic magazine.
The 12-minute film gives a flavour of Tania’s reincarnation — at the hairdressers, out shopping, sipping sparkling white wine at a bar with her fiancé. Attending church.
Another article which appeared last week in Texas Monthly is accompanied by a flattering photograph of her standing in the middle of a field of long grass in a sleeveless white top, her doe-like eyes gazing wistfully at the camera, no evidence of her past as a jihadi.
But what is the truth about Tania and her journey into — and out of — the murderous heart of the ISIS caliphate?
What should we make of what many will regard as a highly self-serving account?
It was to escape, she says, that she went on a Muslim matrimonial website in February 2003 looking for a husband. Within a month, she met John Georgelas, youngest son of Colonel Timothy and Martha Georgelas, who had spent part of his childhood in Cambridgeshire when his father was stationed there during the Eighties
At the Thirties terrace house in Barking, Essex, where they live, Tania’s British-Bangladeshi parents have lost touch with their youngest daughter.
‘We have no contact with her,’ one of her sisters told the Mail earlier this year. And last week, another told me that despite Tania’s denunciation of her unhappy home life in the media, the family has ‘made a decision to not engage with journalists’.
Tania is one of five children born to Nural and Jahanara Choudhury who raised their children as Muslims but also encouraged them to embrace a university education and embark on professional careers.
Her birth name is ‘Joya’, but she was always known as Tania. While her moderate Muslim parents were hard-working — her mother ran a catering business while her father moved between various jobs, including bank clerk and accounts assistant — Tania said that as ‘the fourth unwanted daughter’, she felt unloved and wanted to run away.
Her unhappiness at home, she says, was exacerbated by the racism the family experienced when they were living in Harrow, North-West London, next-door to a halfway house for former prisoners who, she says, smashed their windows and urinated on the roof of the family car.
While it is impossible to verify these stories, one resident in the street, a Pakistani-born woman who still lives opposite the Choudhurys’ former home, told the Mail that she cannot recall ever experiencing racism in what has been for years a highly multi-cultural area.
After the Choudhurys moved across London to Barking, Tania began studying for A-levels at a new sixth-form college in East London. She had never taken religion seriously, but now she fell under the spell of a group of ultra-conservative students.
She began reading the Koran and wearing a loose robe called a jilbab and a niqab to cover her face even though her family ‘hated it’.
‘I thought I had been living a lie, been ignorant of Islam,’ she told Texas Monthly. ‘I started wagging my finger at my family, judging them, calling them insincere Muslims.’
The 2001 terror attack on the Twin Towers in New York, when she was 17, only hardened her resolve. Her new friends, she recalls, said the attack was retaliation for persecution of Muslims throughout time. By her own admission, she went on to become ‘really jihadi, hardcore’.
The 2001 terror attack on the Twin Towers in New York, when she was 17, only hardened her resolve
Her extremist views and the conservative clothes she wore led to rows with her parents. ‘For them, it was going backward, and they didn’t know why I wanted to go backward,’ she said in the interview.
It was to escape, she says, that she went on a Muslim matrimonial website in February 2003 looking for a husband. Within a month, she met John Georgelas, youngest son of Colonel Timothy and Martha Georgelas, who had spent part of his childhood in Cambridgeshire when his father was stationed there during the Eighties.
Like Tania, Georgelas had rebelled against his family and their politically conservative, Christian values.
Despite his military heritage — his World War II hero grandfather was awarded the Purple Heart and his grandmother worked as a secretary at the Pentagon — he had dropped out of school, become a prolific drug-user and converted to Islam shortly after 9/11 after meeting foreign students near his parents’ home in Plano, Texas.
Tania says Georgelas promised ‘travel, a big family and a stable life’. He also promised to take care of her.
‘It was the first time someone was really nice to me,’ she said.
They were married under Islamic law a month after meeting — a union which became legal a year later, in October 2004, when they wed at Rochdale Register Office.
Their eldest son, Hassan, was born in the U.S. shortly after.
During the next ten years, Tania and her husband travelled extensively, flitting between Damascus, Cairo and Dallas.
‘John and I were so thirsty for an Islamic state,’ says Tania in the magazine interview.
‘I was so young and naive. I painted this rosy picture in my mind. I was picturing a Utopia.’
But in Dallas, Tania struggled to play the role of subservient Muslim wife, and was reluctant to wear a robe and a veil.
‘I was getting in tune with American culture,’ she said. ‘He wanted me to dress Islamically. I started questioning him, questioning his thinking.
‘The idea of a caliphate was still important, but I was a mother now.’
But she stuck by her husband. When he was jailed in the U.S. for three years in 2006 for hacking into the website of a pro-Israel lobbying group, loyal Tania waited for him.
In 2009, she gave birth to a second son, Laith, and two years later the pair relocated to Cairo.
A third son, Hari, was born there on Christmas Day 2011 and for a time, the family seemed to enjoy a comfortable life in the city.
Despite his military heritage — his World War II hero grandfather was awarded the Purple Heart and his grandmother worked as a secretary at the Pentagon — Georgegelas had dropped out of school, become a prolific drug-user and converted to Islam shortly after 9/11 after meeting foreign students near his parents’ home in Plano, Texas.
But by 2013, Georgelas was determined to go to Syria. Tania, who was pregnant with their fourth son, was reluctant to take her children into a war zone.
Her relationship with her husband became violent. At one stage, she says, she put a pillow over his head while he slept, but he woke up and forced her off.
‘I didn’t really think I’d kill him,’ she said in the magazine interview. ‘It was more of a cry for help.’
In August that year, they travelled across the border into Syria by bus, setting up home in A’zaz, in the abandoned villa of a Syrian general.
Tania’s stay in Syria lasted only a few weeks. There were shoot-outs on the street. Food was scarce. She and her sons became sick with vomiting bugs. She says she pleaded with Georgelas to let them return to Turkey. Finally, he agreed.
In September 2013, they hired a car and drove to the border, walking through a minefield for the final hour and pushing a buggy with the youngest child in it. Her fourth son was born in January 2014, yet despite the acrimonious way they had parted, he was named after her husband.
This dramatic escape from Islamic State as she was suffering premature contractions and leaking amniotic fluid is, of course, the climax of Tania’s story.
But what followed upon her return to Texas is equally fascinating. In Dallas, she swiftly divorced Georgelas and dropped his surname. Georgelas, who now goes by the name of Yahya al-Bahrumi, is still believed to be in Syria.
With no money of her own, Tania had to move in with her former parents-in-law.
It wasn’t long before she was frequenting the Dallas shopping malls, having her hair done at the salon and learning to shoot at the local gun range. Having abandoned Islam, friends say she describes herself as agnostic or sometimes even atheist.
Having attempted to use marriage as an escape route once before, with such disastrous consequences, she might have been expected to avoid men for a while.
But with four young boys on her hands, she seems to have been keen to replace their father. Speaking during her interview with The Atlantic, she said: ‘I’ve had these children for one reason only and that was so that they could serve God, as Muslims, as mujahideen.
‘And now I didn’t know what to do with them. So I went to the dating website Match. I wrote: “I have four kids. My husband abandoned me to go and become the next Osama Bin Laden.” But I got 1,300 replies.’
Tania said: ‘And now I didn’t know what to do with them. So I went to the dating website Match. I wrote: “I have four kids. My husband abandoned me to go and become the next Osama Bin Laden (pictured).” But I got 1,300 replies’
She met IT executive Craig Burma within 24 hours of being on the site in June 2015. The twice-divorced 48-year-old, who lives in a $500,000 six-bedroom house with a swimming pool in the Dallas suburbs, was instantly smitten. He told the Mail this week: ‘I love her and she is brilliant. She does great things.’
It was Craig, who has three sons of his own, who introduced Tania to ‘Unitarian Universalism’, which has its roots in Christianity but embraces all faiths and offers ‘an open exploration of the divine’.
According to Tania: ‘When I left Islam I was really trying hard to find another religion to replace it. I really missed having a community after Islam. It wasn’t until we started going to this church that I really felt at home in Dallas.’ Certainly, fellow members of the congregation at the church she attends do not appear to be perturbed by having the former jihadi in their midst.
Instead, Tania, with her fragile, almost Disney-esque beauty, appears to have reinvented herself as a heroine in her tale of triumph over adversity, in which American values come out on top.
Footage filmed after one church service shows her chatting to another member of the congregation, telling him: ‘I don’t know if I want to show people my story. It’s a horror story.’ He replies: ‘Isn’t this kind of like therapy, too. American-style. Tell the whole world.’ And Tania replies: ‘I guess it is. If anything, it’s me trying to get my message out to people in similar situations and saying this is not how to live your life.’
While she is being supported financially by her fiancé, she says she is taking online courses in topics including counter-terrorism, human rights and global diplomacy, and hopes one day to work on deradicalisation programmes.
But her story has not gone down well with everyone. Among the many comments left on The Atlantic website, one says: ‘It plays out like a pilot episode for a new Real Housewives of ISIL series.’
And another: ‘The Texas Monthly story assumes we can take everything she says at face value.’ And a third: ‘Do we put it all down to a rather shallow woman with little sophistication getting caught up in propaganda? I trust the FBI has interrogated her at length and found her to be too vapid to be worried about.’
ISIS expert Graeme Wood wrote about Tania in a book published earlier this year called The Way Of The Strangers: Encounters With Islamic State: ‘Tania was no victim: she signed up for jihad, and she passed up nearly a decade of opportunities to ditch Yahya and take her kids far from his dreams of murder and mayhem.’
Tania does not appear to be fazed by such criticism.
‘I love America. I feel very fortunate,’ she said in her interview.
Republican Texas may seem a strange choice of home for a woman who once detested the kind of values espoused by many of the people who live there.
But it is here, it seems, that Tania believes she will finally find the happy ending she has been searching for.