Racism radicalized me: ISIS bride-turned-Texas Christian explains why she married the caliphate's highest ranking American

• e-mail

The British-born jihadi bride who married America's most senior member of ISIS says racism she experienced in the UK led to her joining the terror group.

Tania Georgelas, now 33, said bigotry she experienced growing up in Harrow, London, fueled her hatred for the West and began her radicalization as a youth.

'I faced a lot of racism,' she told The Atlantic in an interview released on Friday. 'I was looking for a way to retaliate, and I wanted honor again.'

The road led her to her ex-husband John Georgelas, an American-born convert to Islam with whom she has four children, and eventually to Syria.

She explained how she dreamed of having seven children who would become assassins and conquer every continent on earth for ISIS before escaping to become a suburban mom in Dallas.

'I've had these children for one reason only, and that was so they could serve god as Muslims, as mujahideen,' she recalled. 

Scroll down for video 

Tania Georgelas, 33 (pictured), the British-born jihadi bride said she became radicalized through the racism she experienced growing up in London

The racism made Tania (left) look 'for a way to retaliate' and seek honor again. Following 9/11, she became 'really jihadi hardcore' and met American-born John Georgelas (right) through a Muslim dating website, and the two were quickly married in October 2004 and later joined ISIS together

Tania was born in Harrow as one of five children of British-Bangladeshi couple Nural, who worked as a senior postmaster, and Jahanara Choudhury.

Her birth name is Joya, but she was known as Tania to her family and friends. 

Tania said the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were a turning point for her radicalization.

While her siblings worked hard at school and went off to university, she is said to have smoked cannabis and shown little interest in academia until she began studying for A-levels at a new sixth form college in East London.

Her family believes it was here that she fell under the influence of a group of ultra-conservative Algerian students, after which she began wearing a full-body veil and espousing the views of gender segregation.

Tania herself traces her radicalisation to the fall of the Twin Towers in 2011, when she was aged 17. 

'I saw the towers being crashed into and I went to school the next day,' she recalled. 'I said to my friend: "Oh isn't it dreadful what happened?" and she looked at me and said: "Is it really?"'

'At that point I became really jihadi hardcore,' she said.

A few years later, she was at a protest against the Iraq war when she says Muslim men were handing out slips of paper, with the address of a Muslim matchmaking website written on them. 

Through the website she met John Georgelas, the youngest child and only son of former US military doctor Colonel Timothy Georgelas and his wife Martha.

Tania had three children with husband John Georgelas and was pregnant with a fourth when the family went to Syria to join ISIS in 2013

Tania is seen with her three youngest children. 'I've had these children for one reason only, and that was so they could serve god as Muslims, as mujahideen,' she recalls

American ISIS fighter John Georgelas is the youngest child and only son of former US military doctor Colonel Timothy Georgelas (pictured) and his wife Martha

Growing up in Plano, Texas, John is said to have rebelled as a teenager, becoming a prolific drug user, dropping out of school and converting to Islam shortly after 9/11.

The couple fell in love over discussions of jihad and dreams of a caliphate: a match made made in hell.

She explained how she even dreamed of her children becoming assassins one day. Here, Tania is pictured with one of her children

The pair began speaking in March 2003 and a month later he flew from the United States to London. Three days after meeting in person they married in a Muslim ceremony and flew together to the city of College Station in Texas.

From College Station, the pair travelled to Damascus in Syria, where their beliefs became more conservative, returning briefly to the UK in 2004 to legally marry. 

Tania was was heavily pregnant when the pair wed in a civil ceremony in October at the Gothic town hall in Rochdale, England.

The pair then moved back to Texas where George was jailed in 2006 for providing IT assistance to jihadi websites.

Tania waited for him to make parole in 2011, and the pair immediately flew to London and then to Cairo. 

They'd had three children and another on the way when, in 2013, they began discussing joining ISIS in Syria.

'John wanted to go to Syria, and I said I wasn't ready, not while the kids are small,' she recalls. 

But in they did go, even though Tania was some five months pregnant, and they brought along their young children.

In August 2013, the family traveled to Syria by bus, setting up home in the abandoned villa of a Syrian general in the town of A'zaz. There were no windows, no running water and only a meager supply of food. Within days, Tania and the children became ill with vomiting bugs and infections. 

Weeks later, in September, Tania convinced John to take her back to Turkey. Having picked her way through a minefield with her youngest child in a buggy, John gave her several hundreds dollars, handed her to a people smuggler, and was gone. 

With the help of John's parents, she made her way back to Texas with the children, and sought and obtained a divorce from him. He remains in Syria to this day, where he has become the highest ranking American in ISIS.

Meanwhile Tania lives with his wealthy parents in Texas, where she quickly returned to the world of online dating.

'I went to the dating website Match, I wrote an essay: "I have four kids, my husband abandoned me to go become the next Osama Bin Ladin". I got 1,300 replies.'

She met her new beau Craig, an IT worker, within 24 hours on the site.

Tania joined Match.com and described herself as a single mother of four whose husband had left 'to become the next Osama Bin Laden'. She quickly got 1,300 replies

'She told me pretty much from about the first phone call,' Craig recalled. 'She said right away that husband was in IS, and I said 'Ok, that's alright'.'

Craig, originally from Minnesota, introduced Tania to the wine bars and bistros of the north Dallas suburbs, and the pair quickly became a couple.

They now attend a Unitarian church together, and Tania says she'd like to work for a de-radicalization program that could help former terrorists.

'A lot of people see me as someone very unlucky, but I see the glass half full,' she said. 'I'm alive, I got out of Syria and my children are happy, healthy and smart. I'm content.' 

In January, the Daily Mail reported that there were some questions around just how completely Tania had severed ties with her former husband and his radical ideology.

After fleeing Syria, she has visited a social networking site used by her husband to post his extremist articles and 'liked' a final post made before the site was closed down.

Georgela (left) is now dating and IT programmer Craig (right)and attending a Unitarian church in Dallas

And, as she wrote in one of her Facebook posts: 'I'm still so in-love with Ioannis (the Greek name for John)….. Nonetheless I'm tired of being pushed over the edge by him, and being told: 'Tania, you're a strong woman! Pick yourself up so I can push you over again!' I want my husband back but not on those terms.'

Atlantic reporter Graeme Wood, an ISIS expert, wrote that in his interviews with Tania, she seemed genuinely reformed.

'She never, in my conversations with her, advocated violence or seriously regretted leaving John at the Syrian border,' Wood wrote.

'And yet there are signs - not of violence, but of a permanent effect of her jihadist brainwashing,' he continued, pointing to an offhand comment Tania had made that Shiite Muslims are 'not really Muslim' and a casual characterization of ISIS followers as just wanting 'to live under a caliphate'.

Of her former husband, who seems destined to die for his vision of a Muslim caliphate as ISIS makes its final stand on dwindling territory, Tania says: 'He thought what he was doing was for the greater good.'

'I can't help but love him. I don't know how to make that feeling stop,' she said.