Blurb
Would you turn your back on a teenage Jihadi bride and her innocent children?
‘Jihad isn’t a war. It’s an objective. An aberration. If there are young women with children, lost boys… If they are trapped in that hell and we can get them out, don’t we have a duty to do so? Every person we can bring back is living proof that Islamic State is a failure.’
Ex-British Army Soldier, John Carney, ran a close protection operation in Iraq for oil executives when he was asked by the family of a young Dutch woman to extract her from the collapsing Islamic State in Syria. Hearing first-hand of the shocking living hell of tricked naive young girls, many from the West, trapped, sexually abused and enslaved by ISIS, he knew only one thing – he had to get them out.
Armed with AK-47s and 9mm Glocks, he launched a daring, dangerous and deadly operation to free as many as he could. With a small band of committed Kurdish freedom fighters, backed by humanitarian NGOs, and feeding intel to MI6, Carney and his men went behind enemy lines in the heart of the Syrian lead storm, risking their lives to deliver the women and their children to the authorities, to de-radicalisation programmes and fair trials.
Gripping, shocking and thought-provoking, Operation Jihadi Bride takes the complex issue of the Jihadi brides head-on – a vital read for our troubled times.
The Rosie Synopsis
Ex-soldier gets into close protection work in Iraq. Years later, he has a wife and daughter, a house and boat in Crete and is generally living the life. Not bad for a kid who survived being beaten up by his dad repeatedly and ended up in a borstal. Then he gets a phone call. A young Dutch woman followed her Palestinian husband to the Daesh Caliphate and now she wants to escape. Mosul is a hellscape. John doesn’t want to get involved.
But he does. With his three Kurdish friends, John sets out to extract women and children trapped inside the Caliphate, whether they were Iraqi, Syrian or European/Australian/American. Funding some of the missions himself or with the help of NGOs, John and his friends, and their contacts in the Kurdish army, various intelligence agencies and insiders in the Caliphate, extracted about 75 women and their children while war raged around them.
The Good
The writing is evocative and heart wrenching at times. John has an understated but powerful voice as he discusses his life before 2013 and his efforts to help women and girls groomed by ISIS.
Groomed is the operative word, they’re manipulative liars preying on the vulnerable at a stage in life when all humans seek their own identity. They play on fears of not being ‘enough’ to get young people to cross the world. What they find is far from the paradise promised. John and his comrades have a lot of compassion for the people they are helping, and it shows through in his writing.
The book also provides the reader with an insight into the murky world of close protection work, intelligence organisations, and Kurdistan (or the bit currently in Iraq, anyway). His cynical opinion of various intelligence agencies and fondness for the Kurds is obvious, and the book reads as a tribute to his friend Cano Ali, who died in a mission to rescue a group of Assyrian Christians being held hostage by jihadis. probably to be used as human shields during an escape.
John does not glorify war, in fact he us quite scathing about the wars he has had to be involved in, but soldiering is one of the few things he’s good at so it’s what he does.
Clifford Thurlow doesn’t seem to be anywhere, which is a good thing with a ‘ghost writer’. He has turned John Carney’s notes and interviews into a coherent narrative.
The Not-So-Good
Minor – reference to a young man ‘suffering from mild autism’. One – we suffer because of inconsiderate prats, sensory differences (I imagine a war zone is sensory hell) and other conditions that come with some of the genetic parcel that also results in autistic brains; two – autism is always spicy, although I prefer mine with BBQ sauce (autistic in-joke – please ignore). The man in question was autistic. He was also manipulated by religious extremists; autistic people are often taken advantage of and manipulated by unscrupulous people. Despite being manipulated he didn’t kill anyone – the notes John made of their last conversation read true, to me, of a young person desperate and telling the truth, there’s a tone to it – and wanted out when he realised the manipulation. He was abused in life, give him some dignity in death.
The Verdict
Absolutely essential reading if you want to understand something of the madness that erupted in Iraq, Syria and Kurdistan in the aftermath of Bush and Blair’s illegal invasion.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 
Thanks so much for the blog tour support x
No problem, it was a great read.
A fine and fair review.