The United States is mulling to adopt the 8-year-old child of a deceased ISIS bride named Ariel Bradley, reported Daily Mail. The development was confirmed by former US diplomat Peter Galbraith to the British daily.
Daily Mail reported that Bradley was raised in Tennessee as a devout evangelical Christian. She was poor and was homeschooled by her mom, based on the curriculum of the Pentecostal Church of God. Bradley did not know how to read until she was a pre-teen and didn’t obtain even a high school diploma. As she grew up, Bradley became disenchanted with her mother’s evangelism. She turned into an atheist and dubbed religion as ‘delusion’. The deceased girl fled her home at the tender age of 16 and lived a wrecked life for the next 10 years.
Reportedly, she was always looking for a ‘sense of belonging’ and companionship. Meanwhile, Bradley became a social activist fighting for fair housing, racial equality, and teachers’ rights. She also began drinking and smoking weed and fell in love with a Muslim man whom she met at a local restaurant. And then Bradley began dressing ‘modestly’, made Muslim friends, wore headscarves, and finally embraced Islam in 2011. While speaking about her, a friend recounted, “The thing about Ariel that was just so weird was that she had a clearly segmented life.”
Bradley married Mohammed, joined ISIS in 2014
The friend added, “It was like when I first met her, she was a Christian, and then she was a socialist, and then she was an atheist and then a Muslim. As far as I could tell it was always in relation to whatever guy she was interested in. So if she meets a guy that’s an atheist, she falls into that for a year. Then the guy leaves and she becomes somebody new and it starts all over again. It seemed like whatever guy she was with, she would just crawl into his skin and kind of become him.” It was perhaps Bradley meeting with a Muslim Iraqi man named Yasin Mohammed in 2011 that made her become like him.
She met him in Sweden in December that year and married him soon after. Her Muslim friends were concerned as they believed that Mohammed was using her to secure US citizenship. But Bradley did not pay any heed to the concerns raised by her friends. Eventually, she became pregnant and moved back to Tennessee in the United States to give birth to her first child. Bradley then moved to Sweden to live with Mohammed and then to Syria to officially join the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014. At that time, her daughter Aminah was just 18 months old. She was again pregnant and gave birth to her son Yaqub.
ISIS bride was influenced by the teachings of Quran, called Syria the land of believers
On her Instagram profile (@umaminahamriki), she would document her life in Syria. In one of her posts, she called the terror-struck place – ‘the land of the believers’. Bradley also shared stories of her children and how they could hear the barrage of bombs while having breakfast.
In another post, she had uploaded the picture of Quran, a year after joining the terror outfit ISIS. She wrote, “Start day well & End it the same..w/remembering Allah.”
Bradley’s first husband died in 2015, second husband killed in 2018
The ISIS propaganda, that prompted her to migrate to Syria, was short-lived as her husband Yasin Mohammed died in a US airstrike in 2015. She then married another ISIS terrorist from Australia by the name of Tareq Kamleh. She then gave birth to a third child named Yousef. In 2018, Bradley, her husband and son Yousef were killed in another airstrike at a hospital. Her daughter Aminah narrowly survived, even though she was badly injured. The whereabouts of her other son Yaqub is not known.
Aminah, now 8 years old, was interviewed by the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. The child expressed ‘deep sadness’ while talking about her family. She is also unable to explain her origins.
According to director Anne Speckhard from the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, the child required a loving environment to get past her traumatic experience with her ISIS parents. Aminah was first traced by a Canadian woman, who has now severed her ties with the terror outfit. She notified former US diplomat Peter Galbraith about the matter. The woman said, “Children in the camps have the worst start to life. They are already traumatized y losing one or more parents and growing up around violence, poverty, and misery. They deal with constant danger, lack of food, lack of education, and their lives are simply going to waste.”
The rescue operation that saved Aminah
Despite his limited powers, the ex-Us diplomat has vowed to give Aminah a better life in the US than she had experienced in Syria. “My ability to do anything is limited. But I want the people who make the decisions to know where she came from and what she went through.” Aminah was rescued from the Camp Roj refugee camp in Syria on July 17 by Peter Galbraith and SDF forces. The child will now be repatriated to the US after following the due process laid down by the US Department of State. The process involved DNA confirmation of the child, followed by rehabilitation.
Peter Galbraith has assured the release of the Canadian woman from Iraq to her home country. The ex-US diplomat conceded, “I didn’t know if I could get Aminah out. I want to give credit to the Canadian woman – without her courage in terms of identifying Aminah and saying where she is, we wouldn’t have been able to get her out. She risked her life to save this child”. Aminah has now been kept in a secret location and steps are being taken to extradite her to the United States for adoption.
