A “normal” Catholic Italian girl has been dubbed “Lady Jihad” because of her recruiting prowess for ISIS.
Former call centre worker Maria Giulia Sergio, 28, converted her entire Italian family to Islam and bullied them into starting new lives in Syria with ISIS, it is alleged.
Maria is now known as Fatima Az Zahra.
Italian anti-terror police arrested her family before they could leave Italy, after their Skype conversations were tapped.
They were accused of terror crimes, imprisoned and refused bail for fear they would abscond to Syria.
Fatima’s mother, Assunta, was only eventually persuaded to leave Italy by her daughter when it was promised that ISIS would supply her with a washing machine.
Only Fatima’s grandmother had sufficient mental strength to resist the offer of life within war-torn Syria.
She was disparaged by her militant granddaughter as a non-believer who “deserves to be left behind”.
From Syria, Fatima ordered her father to “drag Mum here by her hair” because she had “no right to any opinion” and owed “total obedience” to her husband.
Assunta died in prison before facing the charges.
The Skype conversations show Fatima bombarding her family with emotional blackmail and Islamist propaganda.
Fatima laughed about her Albanian Muslim husband stoning an adulterer to death and told her sister that non-believers should be killed in their own land.
She claimed the Islamic Caliphate would eventually encompass Italy anyway, saying: “There will be a great battle in Rome with many mujaheddin dying.”
Fatima is thought to have converted to Islam in 2007, around the time she married her first husband, a Moroccan pizza-maker whom she later divorced.
Before she married, Fatima worked at a call centre near her home and was described by a former colleague as “a completely normal girl” who “came to work with her veil on”.
Sources
- Daily Mail
- Independent
- Image: Daily Mail