I’ll never forget the moment I uncovered Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia’s real name. Back in early 2015, she was a brazen British propagandist and recruiter for the Islamic State. I’d been tracking her for months, almost marvelling at her shamelessness: she had posted pictures of herself brandishing an AK-47 on social media; she had justified the beheading of Western aid-workers; she had celebrated the 2015 Paris attacks; and she had scolded other Muslim women for not covering their faces (and eyes). She was terrifying, tormented and terrible. But who was she really?
Her name was Tooba Gondal, a then 21-year-old from East London. She was a savvy operator on social media and had revealed little about her personal life in her numerous pro-Isis Twitter accounts. But she couldn’t do anything about that tweet from an earlier account she had used before she became an Isis true believer. It was innocuous enough, but there it was: a casual reference to her father by his full name.
Last month, Benedetta Argentieri’s documentary The Matchmaker premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The film is about Gondal, who, in her incarnation as Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia, sought to enlist foreign women and girls to Isis, where they would become the wives of the male fighters. The film’s title self-consciously appropriates Gondal’s tabloid name (“the Isis matchmaker”), but there’s nothing remotely sensationalist or cheap about the film.
Argentieri first met Gondal in March 2019, where she was filming at the Ain Issa Camp, and where Gondal, now 28, had surfaced with her two young children shortly after Isis’s final territorial defeat at Baghuz. Never shy of media attention, Gondal was a willing participant in the documentary. The entire project is a riveting case study in the psychology of denial and dissimulation: Gondal portrays herself as a victim, flagrantly lies and contradicts herself. 1
“It’s a mystery why anybody talks to a reporter,” Lawrence Wright has observed. Why would you willingly expose yourself to a cold-hearted stranger with a story to tell? Of course, Wright knows all-too-well why people talk to reporters: because they want to be heard and understood, because they enjoy the attention and feel important, and because they want to shape or control the narrative about themselves.
Yet often they come to regret their credulity, realising that their journalist-interlocutor is not, in Janet Malcolm’s words, the “permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother” they’d imagined, but “the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father”. Even the most powerful and privileged people are susceptible to this delusion: earlier this year, when Mohammed bin Salman agreed to an interview with The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, he must have thought that Wood would be a soft touch. (He wasn’t.)
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SubscribeLooking at her, reading about what she did, and seeing the lack of remorse evident in the interview….and the lack of empathy for a child being bought and sold like a piece of flesh (is there any wonder there a dozen gangs in Britain who view “other” women the same way, all from her community?)
Pure evil. No other word for it.
Should we worry about Tooba Gondal, who left for the ISIS state, or worry about people like her who didn’t leave?
But so many lefties in uk would want her to come back.
And so many pro mass immigration are advocating for greater numbers of low IQ savages from Asia and Africa to come here.
Happy days…
“Wish I could have seen the hostages being slaughtered last night with my own eyes. Would have been just beautiful.”
Why the hell was this psychopath not banned from Twitter???
Twitter actually assisted Isis in recruiting members.
Gondal is a vile monster, and Twitter has been enabling monsters for years.
Many non-Westerners work in corporations like Twitter and Google, and some of them get a say in who gets banned or not. It’s a lot like this in my field too: academia.
Yes, quite incredible, when you consider that at one time, if you dared to question masks, lockdowns or Covid vaccines you’d be banned from Twitter in an instant. Applaud genocide? No problem.
‘Every villain wears a mask of goodness’. Chilling.
Jacinda Ardern!
Spot on, splendid, thank you.
I, & probably most other intelligent people, could very easily say how to deal with her but won’t!
She is beyond redemption as her own words prove.
The core questions are: What sort of environment during childhood ends up creating terrorists? Is too much exposure to strict religiosity during childhood dangerous? Why did this woman feel compelled to live under Sharia? Why are some Islamic societies so successful in creating terrorists? If an open society wants to limit giving rise to this sort of monsters, it needs to ask these fundamental questions, and put in place appropriate measures.
Don’t blame religion in general. Most strictly religious groups don’t spawn terrorists.
Islamic suicide bombers blow themselves up for Islam because they genuinely believe that they are doing God’s work, and that they will go to jannat (heaven) for that.
Indeed, I don’t understand this desperation some people have to excuse these things, some people are monsters, we have always known this, history is replete with them, it is not different now.
With radical Islam, I would say rather that the terrorists come from a shame-based authoritarian culture where men are encouraged to prove their manhood by being willing to act out violence. And a culture where women are both completely devalued but also completely essential. Neither men nor women in such a culture are able to express empathy for anyone who acts outside of their cultural bounds.
When something tells you what it is, over and over again, it’s probably best to listen.
easy on the eye? Perhaps I should convert and have her as one of my 8 wives?
Try Specsavers!
now… where did I put the detonator, timer and my sugar and weedkiller?
Why bother. Blow yourself up and you will get (not quite sure) 72 virgins in paradise.
No alcohol, though…
Bergen full of viagra and a jerry can of baby oil?
Gave up the jar 20 years ago.. So at least my hands wont shake on the detonator… but how will I be able to get the lubricant up there?
As they say, there’s no accounting for taste.