How-twisted-British-mother-nicknamed-Mrs-Terror-turned-son-Joe-11-grinning-ISIS-killer
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, although they have no way to prove it.
‘If there is a God, why can’t he stop it?’ added the distraught grandma, who is in her 60s.
Indeed, Joe’s relatives are struggling to come to terms with what he has done and, while they tell neighbours and acquaintances they hope he never comes home, privately they still yearn for the return of the happy little boy who loved reading encyclopaedias and adored animals so much that ‘he’d never even tread on an ant’.
‘It’s worse than being in mourning,’ said the family friend who spoke to the Mail. ‘They love Joe and miss him but are scared of the forces that have turned him. His grandmother has lost her grandson. She doesn’t think she can do anything to get him back, and even if he does come back he’s not the same boy who went out there.’
Certainly, Joe’s life has changed beyond all recognition in the two-and-a-half years since he left Kent for Syria with his mother. Up until then, he spent every weekend with his grandparents.
He had an inquiring mind, they say, and doted on his pet rabbit and cat as well as playing endlessly with his dog Rizzy. In the summer they took him to the beach at Herne Bay and Whitstable and on caravanning holidays to Great Yarmouth.
In many ways he was closer to them than he was to his own feckless mother. Indeed, a worried Joe even confided in his grandmother his fear that his mother was planning to take him out of the country.
‘He was having difficulty sleeping,’ said the family friend. ‘The grandmother discovered that the thing that was worrying him was that his mother was planning a trip.’
When challenged, Jones insisted that Joe had made a mistake and that they were merely going on holiday to Turkey. In fact, they were heading for Raqqa in Syria, hot on the heels of her new 19-year-old husband, Birmingham Jihadi Junaid Hussain — a man 25 years her junior.
Once there, Jones changed her name to Sakinah Hussain. Joe’s name was changed to Hamza and he was forced to call Hussain ‘dad’.
Hussain himself was killed by a U.S. drone strike a year ago, but by then blonde Jones, who also calls herself Umm Hussain Al-Britani, had become a figure of notoriety in her own right, peddling vile ISIS propaganda via social media sites and posing for photographs with an AK-47 rifle.
It is Jones, of course, who holds the key to this disturbing story and the sickening images of Joe which shocked the world last week.
She is the only daughter of greengrocer turned lorry driver Alan Jones and his wife Jacky. Jones’s older brother runs a business in the Home Counties, and, perhaps not surprisingly, declines to speak about his sister.
Jones was still a girl when her parents divorced and just ten when her father committed suicide after taking an overdose. Her mother went on to marry the director of a haulage company and Jones and her brother were raised in South-East London and, later, in a leafy village in Kent.
Those who knew the family say they were close and loving. Jones, who left school at 16 and worked sporadically as a beautician, was raised as a Catholic and attended Christian youth groups in her teens and early 20s, but she became interested in punk music, started dressing in skimpy leather miniskirts and drinking heavily. Slowly she began to go off the rails.
For a time she played bass guitar in an all-girl band called Krunch which performed across the south east in the Nineties, although her fledgling music career appears to have come to an end when she became pregnant by her on-off boyfriend, labourer Jonathan Wilkinson.
She was very scatty. Everything was always a drama. Her language wasn’t very good. She was extremely loud. She was a lady with problems as far as I could tell a neighbour of Sally Jones
Relatives described the pair as ‘free spirits’ who once spent nine months living in a tent and often broke up, going off to have other relationships before ‘always coming back to each other’.
But two years after their son was born in 1996, 29-year-old Wilkinson died from liver cirrhosis.
Jones’s mother, who died in 2008, supported her daughter throughout these rocky years.
Neighbours in Kent recall how Jones used to visit her mother and stepfather in a converted bus.
‘She was a total hippy,’ said one. ‘She used to park outside and visit most weekends. She was all over the place. She used to take drugs.’
After her partner’s death, Jones moved into a two-bedroom terrace council house on an estate in Kent, but often left their son with her mother and stepfather.
According to the neighbour who spoke to the Mail: ‘They took him on, probably from about the age of ten. They looked after him right through secondary school. He would go and stay with Sally sometimes.’
It was into this dysfunctional set-up that Joe was born in late 2004.
Despite that ‘happy’ picture in their local newspaper, Jones’s relationship with Joe’s father was short-lived. Relatives say that she suffered post-natal depression, started drinking heavily and often took to her bed.
Neighbours in the close where she lived also paint an unstable picture of a troubled woman who was in debt and constantly visited by bailiffs as well as local drug dealers.
Jones, they say, regularly boasted that she was a witch with the ability to practise black magic.
According to one: ‘She was very scatty. Everything was always a drama. Her language wasn’t very good. She was extremely loud. She was a lady with problems as far as I could tell.’
As a single mother of two, living on benefits, she was desperate to escape the grim reality of her life — not to mention her debtors — and spent hours each day on the internet.
A trail of old posts and messages she has left behind gives a fascinating glimpse of a previous life totally at odds with the Islamic faith she now claims to follow.
Obsessed with the film Avatar, she hid behind various different personas on several websites.
On one, where she refers to herself as ‘Skya, Kentish witch’ and claims to be the sister of another of her personas, she is asked: ‘Are you the good sister or the evil sister’.
Her reply is simple: ‘E.V.I.L.’
It is hard to imagine what life must have been like for Joe growing up with such a mother.
Relatives of Jones’s older son recall that from the age of 14 or 15, he would call them and ask them to come and collect him.
‘We would go and pick him up and he would come and visit us a lot, sometimes for weeks on end. He would come to the door and say: “Mum isn’t very well. She’s in bed.” We wouldn’t see her at all.’
Meanwhile, Joe’s grandparents were also stepping into the breach.
The family friend who spoke to the Mail recalls how the little boy loved visiting and looking out for the foxes which roamed around his grandmother’s garden. He was kind to animals. He loved feeding his pets. He was so kind, he’d never even tread on an ant. That’s why his grandmother can’t understand what’s happened to him.’
Jones’s chaotic, self-destructive lifestyle eventually led her to an online dating site where she met Junaid Hussain, the son of a Birmingham school dinner lady.
He had already fallen foul of the law after hacking into the personal email account of a former special adviser to Tony Blair and obtaining confidential addresses and phone numbers.
At a hearing at Southwark Crown Court in 2012, the then 18-year-old also pleaded guilty to making nuisance telephone calls to a counter- terrorism hotline.
After being charged with a further offence of violent disorder, he skipped bail and fled to Syria in 2013. Jones immediately made plans to join him. She later told relatives she had ‘fallen in love’ with the teenager.
God knows what they showed her about Syria, but she thought that was the place where she would be happy and have a better life’
A relative of Sally Jones said..
‘She was always het up on finding the right person,’ says one relative. ‘She just wanted to be part of the Muslim religion like this guy she had fallen in love with. She wanted to convert to his faith, but she never said anything about extremism or anything like that.
‘She just wanted a way out to go to a better place. God knows what they showed her about Syria, but she thought that was the place where she would be happy and have a better life.’
Another says: ‘She’s probably someone’s slave now. She didn’t like doing housework and cooking before she went, so why she went there nobody knows.’
During the Christmas school holidays in 2013, Jones took her son to Turkey. From there they travelled to Idlib, a town in north-west Syria where she met up with Hussain. Seven months later, they arrived in Raqqa.
Meanwhile her elder son, who was 18 at the time, went to live with his father’s relatives after refusing to travel abroad with his mother. He has since become a father himself.
Joe’s grandparents knew there was something wrong when they failed to return from ‘holiday’.
Not long after, Joe’s primary school telephoned to find out where he was. The family says it has heard nothing since from either police or social services. Last year, not long after he arrived in Raqqa, Joe called his grandmother. ‘Hello Nanny,’ he said.
He went on to tell her that his ‘dad’ had bought him trainers from the local market and that he had ‘lots of friends’ to play with.
The family friend adds: ‘She had so much she wanted to ask him but she could hear the boy was being cautioned by his mother in the background. He must have looked around to her for permission to answer the questions his grandmother was putting to him because she could hear Sally’s voice going “no” to many of them.’
It was the last time the family had any contact with Joe. Since her husband’s death, Jones is believed to have moved from Raqqa to Mosul in Iraq, fleeing from advancing Kurdish and government forces.
In May, she posted a photograph of herself in a black burqa, apparently beside the River Tigris, enjoying ‘a beautiful summer with my son’.
Back in Britain, the Kent council house where Joe began his life was boarded up and then cleared out by the council.
The family says it was not allowed to collect Jones’s belongings or the toys Joe had left behind. Among them were his favourite Hex Bugs, tiny computerised ‘bugs’ which ran around on their own track and which were among his final Christmas presents.
‘His grandmother misses him and he’s in the back of her mind always,’ said the family friend. ‘She’s constantly worrying, not knowing where he is or whether he is ok.’
Despite the shocking images they have seen it seems they cannot turn their backs on the innocent blue-eyed boy they love unconditionally.
‘They still love him,’ added the family friend. ‘They still have his pictures although they’re not on the wall. One day, they think they might meet him as a grown man.’
But should that day ever come, there can be no doubt now that the grandchild they doted on no longer exists.
He is gone for ever, transformed beyond recognition by his evil mother and her ISIS cohorts.
culled from dailymail
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