And today The Mail on Sunday can unmask the evil ‘matchmaker’ known by the pseudonym Umm Muthanna Al Britaniyah.
She is a former London student whose real name is Tooba Gondal. She is 22 years old and her father is a successful businessman.
Her transformation, in a few years, from happy schoolgirl about to leave for college to ISIS cheerleader in a burka toting an AK-47 is stark.
These days, instead of furthering her education, her most cherished desire is to become a ‘martyr’ in a suicide bombing.
Through her prolific output on social media, she commands a powerful influence on her following of largely young girls as she ‘grooms’ them, urging them, as she has done, to travel to Syria and marry bloodthirsty ISIS killers.
In her online rants, she described Britain as ‘a filthy country’ and praised the Paris massacre last November, which left more than 130 dead, saying: ‘EXPLOSIONS AND SHOOTINGS… 80 dead. And all praise is due to Allah Almighty. #ParisUnderAttack.’
She added: ‘Wish I could have seen the hostages being slaughtered last night with my own eyes.
Would have been just beautiful.’
In May last year, using the name Fatima, she encouraged a British teenager she met on social media to travel to Syria and join ISIS.
She then asked the teenage recruit to meet one of her own relatives – a 16-year-old girl – and bring her to Syria too.
The plan was to fly to Switzerland then Istanbul, and then travel by land to the Syrian border.
But it all fell apart because the teenager that Gondal thought she was grooming was actually an undercover reporter.
The newspaper alerted police, who arrested Gondal’s relative at home. She has since been dealt with by officers from Prevent, Scotland Yard’s deradicalisation unit.
Exactly how Gondal, from Walthamstow, East London, ended up promoting the barbarity of ISIS killers from their stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, is not clear, but this is not a story of a disenfranchised, no-hoper youth looking for a way out of desperate circumstances.
She is the eldest daughter of a successful London businessman and was, according to friends, in the top set for all subjects at her local secondary, Kelmscott School – though also something of a rebel.
A photograph of Gondal in her final-year yearbook in 2010 shows her wearing the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, to school.
But classmates recalled how she would remove her hijab on the way to school, to allow her long brown hair to hang free, then put it back on the way home.
One ex-classmate said: ‘She was a rebel. She did come to school with the headscarf, but she would then take it off. She also liked sneaking out of her house.’
The friend, who did not want to be identified, said Gondal even smoked at school and had secret boyfriends. She adored boy bands and their music – a far cry from the terror songs she would come to love.
The friend said she stayed in contact with Gondal by social media during their college years, but noticed a change about two years ago.
None of the former friends we spoke to had any clue as to why Gondal would go to Syria, Daily Mail reported.
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