Smiling for the camera in the maternity suite of Maritime Medway hospital in Gillingham, Kent, the delighted couple held up their sleepy 6 lb infant. His tiny body, swamped by a blue Baby-gro, fitted snugly into his mother’s hands.
But this apparently happy family portrait marks the beginning of an extraordinary and tragic story, one which has quietly unfurled over the past decade or so.
The newborn baby in the photograph is called Joe. He is the youngest child of 47-year-old ISIS convert Sally Jones who fled to Syria in 2013, the son she took with her on her ill-fated travels. This heart-warming image, published just days after his birth, is a million miles from the shocking images which emerged last week of a now 11-year-old Joe dressed in ISIS fatigues, holding a gun to the head of a kneeling Kurdish prisoner and preparing to execute him.
Now, for the first time, the Mail can tell the story of how this once-innocent child was snatched away from the life he knew in Britain and turned into an ISIS executioner by his wicked mother.
Friends and relatives, including his grandmother, have spoken of their utter grief at being separated from Joe when he vanished with Jones nearly three years ago and the trauma of discovering what he has been coerced — or at the very least, brainwashed — into doing.
They have also told how the little boy once called them from Syria but was prevented from speaking freely by his mother who stood beside him.
They have spoken under condition of anonymity for fear, not only of what Jones and her ISIS cohorts might do to them, but of reprisals closer to home from extreme Right-wing nationalists fuelled by Islamophobia.
‘I felt sick to the stomach,’ his grandmother told a friend after seeing barbaric images of her grinning grandson moments before he, and four other boys, each shot a prisoner in the back of the head. The family are convinced it is Joe in the picture, but they have no way to prove it.
Source: UK Daily mail
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