The UK Punk Guitarist Who Became an ISIS Recruiter

A British former punk guitarist and singer who became an ISIS propagandist is thought to have been killed in a drone strike. According to The Sun newspaper, Sally Jones was killed in June – but the reports, based on unnamed sources, have been disputed. The spokesman for the US-led coalition against ISIS tweeted on Thursday that he "cannot confirm death of ISIS propagandist Sally Jones as a result of a Coalition strike.", and New York Times correspondent Rukmini Callamachi, who covers ISIS for the newspaper, also tweeted that two senior US officials she'd spoken to "denied that Sally Jones is dead".

Whether dead or alive, Sally Jones did in fact go from being a member of a punk band to recruiting online for a global terrorist organisation. Born in Greenwich, southeast London, according to The Guardian, Sally Jones performed as part of the all-woman punk band Krunch in the 1990s, playing guitar and singing. She converted to Islam before reportedly travelling to Syria in 2013, with her then 10-year-old son, to join her husband Junaid Hussain.

"There's been lot of activity on social media the past few years regarding recruitment, whether it's single women to become wives of fighters," said executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute Steve Stalinsky of propagandists like Jones, when speaking to VICE News in 2014. "And also there's been a push to have families come. They're trying to make it sound good. It's not just European women, they're trying to build a state of followers, so if men are coming to fight they're not going to stay there without the women. It's about creating a home, a country, having children, having schools."

According to a report from 2014, Jones was thus one of many thousand people who'd left their homes in Europe and the global North to attempt to join IS as fighters. In some ways, though, her case may stand out. Speaking to The Guardian Shiraz Maher, senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King's College London, said that if Jones had been killed, this was "the first woman I know of who's been specifically targeted in this way." The global Counter Extremism Project have pinpointed Jones as being responsible for the training of all female, European ISIS recruits – according to the project, she was one of the group's most effective recruiters, mostly via social media.

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