Zehra Duman

Zehra Duman
Born1993 (age 32–33)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
CitizenshipTurkish (by descent)
Australia
Known forusing social media to recruit volunteers for jihadism

Zehra Duman (born 1993) is an Australian woman[1][2] who traveled to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant territory, where she married a jihadi fighter.[3]

Duman was a friend of Tara Nettleton, who traveled from Australia with her five children to join her jihadi husband Khaled Sharrouf in ISIL territory in 2014.[4][5] Duman's online recruiting activities have been the subject of scholarly attention.[6][7][8] Her Australian citizenship was revoked in 2019,[9] but it was restored in 2023 after an appeal.[10]

Early life

Duman was born in Melbourne, a third-generation Australian of Turkish descent.[11] She described her childhood as difficult and said her parents were divorced and she suffered from depression in her early teens.[11] She attended Sirius College, a private school in Keysborough. Her school principal later said the staff "did not notice any extremist tendencies" in Duman.[12] She did not grow up as a practicing Muslim, but became one by her later teens.

At age fourteen, Duman briefly dated a local boy named Mahmoud Abdullatif. After that relationship ended she didn't have any contact with him for years. In 2014, Abdullatif reached out to Duman again over social media and told her he would give her "a beautiful life." By this time, he was 23 years old and in ISIL territory, and Duman went there to marry him.[12] She traveled to Syria in November 2014 at the age of 19, without telling anyone in advance of her decision, taking only a few sets of clothes with her.[2][13] She later said her parents were "shocked, as I never have been public with my jihadi views. But also heartbroken" by her decision.[12]

Life under ISIL

Duman said that in Syria, she initially had to stay in one of ISIL's houses were unmarried women lived together. They took her phone and passport, and women were not allowed to leave the house until someone married them. After a month, Mahmoud Abdullatif married her and took to Raqqa, ISIL's Syrian capital, where they lived in a compound with other Australians he knew, including Tara Nettleton and Khaled Sharrouf and their children.[11] The couple announced their union online on December 11, 2014, with a photo of Duman's dowry: an assault rifle.[12]

She took the nom de guerre Umm Abdullatif Australi.[13][14] Both she and her husband posted images from Syria on social media, including photos of people posing with guns. Duman often posted photos that included Nettleton and Sharrouf's children.[13] One of her posts featured a photo of the couple's oldest son posing with a gun; Duman wrote she hoped the boy would have a "beautiful death".[1] She also taunted Australian authorities, tweeting, "Catch me if you can."[14] Photos Duman tweeted of herself and four other women, clad head to toe in black, holding AK-47 rifles, and posing over an expensive sports car, have been widely republished.[8][15]

Duman has been described as an active recruiter of volunteers, a jihad supporter who claimed to want to personally undertake suicide mission or engage in combat.[6][16] She advised women who wanted to join ISIL to either travel there with a mahram such as their father or brother, or to commit attacks at home if they were unable to travel to the ISIL caliphate.[12] When asked what she missed about Australia, she tweeted back a number zero by way of reply.[12]

In an interview with SBS World News conducted over Twitter, Duman said people who were killed by ISIL deserved their fate: "Dawla would never harm anyone who hasn't did anything wrong."[13] Her Twitter account was suspended in 2015, after she called for violence against non-Muslims, saying "stab them and poison them. Poison your teachers. Go to haram restaurants and poison the food in large quantities."[14]

Duman's husband was killed in action five weeks after their marriage.[17] After her husband's death, Duman said on her Ask.fm account that "alhamdulillah I have my sisters whom I love for the sake of Allah always at my house" and so she wasn't lonely.[18] She told an SBS News reporter she was "actually so happy" for Abdullatif when he was killed because that was what he had wanted, and that she wanted martyrdom for herself as well.[13]

According to her later statements, following the death Abdullatif, Duman was immediately pressured to remarry, and traveled to Mosul in ISIL-occupied Iraq. After her religiously mandated widow's mourning period was over, she married a man named Nedol, who was killed in an airstrike in 2016. By the time of his death, she was pregnant with their son. Seven months after the boy's birth, Duman says, she tried to flee ISIL territory and was jailed by them for three months, accused of spying and threatened with execution. A man named Baran offered to have her released from jail on the conditions that she marry him and that she never use the internet again. She agreed, and she and Baran married. They had a daughter in late 2018.[11]

Duman's third husband was killed in battle near Baghouz in January 2019. After his death, Duman left ISIL territory with her two children. By this time, her son was almost four years old and her daughter was an infant.[19]

After the defeat of ISIL

In February 2019, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation obtained a video of Duman in the Al Hawl camp in northeast Syria. She said she had been living with Tara Nettleton when Nettleton died in 2015, and that Nettleton's three surviving children remained in ISIL-occupied territory and were "fine" the last time she saw them.[20]

On 28 February 2019, Dateline interviewed Duman's mother, who had recently heard from her.[21] Her mother told Dateline that, by 2017, Duman had grown disenchanted with ISIL, and wanted to come home to Australia, but could not because of ISIL's intense scrutiny of those living in its territory. She said Duman and her children were being held in poor conditions and that Duman had expressed suicidal thoughts.[19]

On 14 March 2019, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that an Australian woman who declined to identify herself, but who was believed to be Duman, was staying in the Al Hawl refugee camp, trying to return to Australia with her two children. She described a significant shortage of food, and she feared her six-month-old daughter would starve to death.[14]

The New Daily reported that Duman, and other Australian citizens, had been taken from the Al Hawl camp, in mid 2019. The Australian citizens were hooded, so they would not know where they were. They reported that the other Australians were taken to Iraq, where they met with Australian officials, while Duman was detained in an unknown location. There was speculation that she was removed for her own protection as the most devout followers of the ISIL philosophy in the camp disapproved of signs she had abandoned radicalism. In particular, she had stopped covering her head, and had taken up smoking cigarettes. She was returned to the camp without any explanation.[22]

On 7 October 2019, Duman's Australian citizenship was revoked.[9][23] In December 2019, the Herald-Sun cited Duman as an example, when it quoted an American official who called on US allies, like Australia, to repatriate their citizens instead of stripping them of citizenship. The official argued that stripping citizens of citizenship can backfire, and trigger them to acts of violence.[23]

That same year, Duman escaped from Al Hawl and was detained when she entered Turkey at the border crossing at Tell Abyad. In September, a Turkish court in Sanliurfa sentenced her to six years and ten months in prison for being a member of an armed terrorist group. She denied having ever played an active role in ISIL and said she simply lived in areas controlled by the group. Two months later she appeared before a court in Gaziantep and was ordered released from custody, because there was no one else to look after her children.[11]

As of June 2021, Duman was living with her children in an unknown location in Turkey.[11] She appealed the loss of her Australian citizenship and also sought Australian citizenship for her children. In August 2023, her citizenship was restored to her.[10]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Sharrouf children alive, Australian jihadi bride says as she flees IS stronghold". ABC News. 27 February 2019. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
  2. ^ a b "The women of ISIS". www.lowyinstitute.org. Retrieved 15 March 2026.
  3. ^ Andrea Hamblin (14 December 2014). "Jihad bride spouts hate on social media". Herald Sun. Archived from the original on 17 May 2018. Retrieved 22 February 2019. The former Isik College Keysborough student declared she would burn her Australian passport as she travelled to meet Mahmoud Abullatif, a former Melbourne party boy-turned Muslim extremist who earlier this year joined the barbaric IS terrorist fighters in the Middle East.
  4. ^ Erin Marie Saltman; Melanie Smith (2015). 'Till Martyrdom Do Us Part' Gender and the ISIS Phenomenon (PDF). Institute for Strategic Dialogue. p. 4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 March 2016. Retrieved 14 September 2022.
  5. ^ Kelly, Cait (8 October 2019). "How Melbourne schoolgirl Zehra Duman became Australia's first ISIS bride". The New Daily. Retrieved 8 October 2019.
  6. ^ a b Anita Perešin (2015). "Fatal Attraction: Western Muslimas and ISIS". Perspectives on Terrorism. 9 (3). Archived from the original on 13 April 2018. Retrieved 22 February 2019. The same intention was expressed by Umm Layth who told her father, shortly after she arrived in Syria, that she wanted to become a martyr and would see him again on the "day of judgment," while Zehra Duman often tweets about her own personal wish to undertake istishad-operations [suicide missions].
  7. ^ Huey, Laura; Kalyal, Hina (2015). "'Questions about Dawlah. DM me, plz.' The Sock Puppet Problem in Online Terrorism Research". Sociology Publications (33). Archived from the original on 24 February 2019. Retrieved 24 February 2019.
    - Sofia Patel (2017). "The Sultanate of Women: Exploring female roles in perpetrating and preventing violent extremism" (PDF). Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 February 2019. Retrieved 22 February 2019. A Melbourne girl from a Turkish background, Zehra Duman, travelled to Iraq in December 2014, aged 21. She has been noted for her role in assisting IS's online communications strategy through her very vocal online presence, painting a romantic picture of life inside the caliphate. In her role as a recruiter, she allegedly assisted Sydney mother of two Jasmina Milovanov to make hijrah in May 2015.
  8. ^ a b Anne Speckhard (20 October 2015). "The Hypnotic Power of ISIS Imagery in Recruiting Western Youth". International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. Zehra Duman, a female ISIS bride from Melbourne, Australia for instance posted this photo with the media caption, 5 Star Jihad. M5 in the land of Sham, he he. She was alluding to the BMW the women were seated upon implying that life is good for women in ISIS.
  9. ^ a b Chris Hook (8 October 2019). "ISIS bride who dared authorities to 'catch me if you can' loses Australian citizenship". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 23 May 2020.
    - Maiden, Samantha (7 October 2019). "Morrison government strips jihadi bride Zehra Duman of Australian citizenship". The New Daily. Retrieved 8 October 2019.
  10. ^ a b Whinnett, Ellen (6 August 2023). "Jihadi bride Zehra Duman's Australian citizenship is formally restored by High Court". The Australian. Retrieved 15 March 2026.
  11. ^ a b c d e f "Notorious IS bride living free in Turkey despite 7-year prison sentence". ABC News. 10 June 2021. Retrieved 15 March 2026.
  12. ^ a b c d e f "From middle-class Australian to ISIS bride". rudaw.net. Retrieved 15 March 2026.
  13. ^ a b c d e "EXCLUSIVE: We spoke with Aussie Zehra Duman about why she joined Islamic State". SBS News. 7 March 2019. Retrieved 15 March 2026.
  14. ^ a b c d Harvey, Adam; Dredge, Suzanne; Hancock, Tom (14 March 2019). "Australian jihadi bride who fled Islamic State wants to bring her children home from Syrian refugee camp". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on 14 March 2019. Retrieved 14 March 2019.
  15. ^ Souad Mekhennet; Joby Warrick (26 November 2017). "The jihadist plan to use women to launch the next incarnation of ISIS". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 27 November 2017. Retrieved 22 February 2019. A photo posted on Twitter on March 18, 2015, by Zehra Duman, a.k.a. Umm Abdullatif, a self-professed Australian female ISIS member. (SITE Intelligence Group)
  16. ^ Geoff Chambers (26 January 2015). "Australian jihadi bride Zehra Duman's terror taunt after playboy husband Mahmoud Abdullatif dies". The Daily Telegraph. Sydney. Retrieved 22 February 2019. Duman is understood to be based in Raqqa, where her husband and friend Suhan Rahman posed in photos with notorious Sydney terrorist Mohamed Elomar. The number of Australians involved in the Syrian conflict, has now increased to approximately 90, up from 75 last year.
  17. ^ "Who are the Australian women travelling to Syria as brides of the Caliphate?". news.com.au. 8 May 2016. Archived from the original on 22 February 2019. Retrieved 22 February 2019. Also from Melbourne, Zehra married a Melbourne man who was fighting for Islamic State, Mahmoud Abdullatif. He was killed in action just five weeks later.
  18. ^ "Wayback Machine" (PDF). docs.euromedwomen.foundation. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 November 2025. Retrieved 14 March 2026. {{cite web}}: Cite uses generic title (help)
  19. ^ a b "EXCLUSIVE: Mother of Aussie 'IS Bride' reveals herself in desperate plea for daughter, grandchildren". SBS News. 5 September 2019. Retrieved 15 March 2026.
  20. ^ Sally Rawthorned (28 February 2019). "'They are safe, that's the main thing': Sydney ISIS children reported alive". Sydney Morning Herald. Archived from the original on 28 February 2019. Retrieved 14 September 2022. A video obtained by the ABC shows Australia's first ISIS bride Zehran Duman, who left Melbourne in 2014 to live under the Caliphate where she married Melbourne man Mahmoud Abdullatif, claiming that the three children are 'fine'.
  21. ^ Naima Brown (28 February 2019). "Mother of Australian 'IS bride' begs government 'please bring my daughter home'". Dateline. Archived from the original on 12 March 2019. Retrieved 13 March 2019. Now, she is believed to be waiting alongside fellow former IS brides British Shemima Begum and American Hoda Muthana in Al-Hol, a makeshift camp for displaced people in Syria and is hoping to come home to Australia.
  22. ^ Samantha Maiden (13 October 2019). "Labor calls for return of ISIS wives and children from Syria". The New Daily. Retrieved 22 July 2020. But while the other mothers and children were taken to Iraq, where they met Australian officials, Ms Duman was detained with her two children in Syria. She does not know where she was imprisoned, why she was imprisoned or why she was released and returned to the camps.
  23. ^ a b Chris Hook (2 December 2019). "US official warns Australia against stripping jihadis of citizenship". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 23 May 2020.
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