How Elomar and Sharrouf met their fate
GRASPING the hair of a severed head, a Sydney schoolboy stands surrounded by the butchered bodies of Syrian soldiers, smiling for the camera. The nine-year-old’s father takes photos.
GRASPING the hair of a severed head, a Sydney schoolboy stands surrounded by the butchered bodies of Syrian soldiers, smiling for the camera.
The nine-year-old’s father, Khaled Sharrouf – a schizophrenic convicted terrorist – and his best mate Mohamed Elomar watch on proudly, taking photos of the grimmest of scenes.
“That’s my boy,” Sharrouf boasts under a photo posted on Twitter.
The startling image would shock the nation, the world and horrify Sydney’s Muslim community.
Overnight, one of their own – a former Chester Hill High student – had become a poster boy for ISIS.
As Sharrouf and Elomar travelled the Syrian and Iraqi countryside in their luxury BMW, they ruthlessly enforced their twisted version of Islamic law.
Sharrouf was soon wanted for war crimes including shooting dead an Iraqi official and buying, selling and torturing Yazidi women.
The 33-year-old and his sidekick, former boxing champion Elomar, arrived in Syria in late 2013 to join ISIS.
They travelled together, lived together and last week reportedly died together in a targeted air strike near the ancient Iraqi city of Mosul.
While Elomar’s death is certain, Sharrouf’s fate remains a mystery.
The enigmatic terrorist was a drug abuser, psychiatric patient, disability pensioner, hired thug and convicted terrorist.
As a standover man in Sydney, Sharrouf was familiar with guns. Shortly before their departure to join IS, Sharrouf and Elomar were linked with drive-by shootings involving high-profile underworld figures.
The pair also associated closely with notorious building industry figure George Alex, spending three times a week boxing at his home.
Their day job as hired goons starkly contrasted with their lives as radical Islamists, visiting the Al Risalah centre in Bankstown and taking part in hardcore prayer meetings and rallies.
Sharrouf’s obsession with terrorism landed him in prison after he was convicted for his role in the 2005 Pendennis plot, where a group of extremists conspired to attack targets in Sydney and Melbourne.
One of the plot’s ringleaders was Elomar’s namesake uncle Mohamed, currently serving 21 years for the crime in Goulburn’s Supermax prison.
Sharrouf was charged after buying six clocks and stealing 140 batteries from a Big W store – provisions to be used to build bombs – and slapped with a 47-month prison term.
Al Risalah centre director Wissam Haddad said Sharrouf was fulfilling his dream to fight for Islam and was “willing to give up everything to do that”. The pair became friends when Sharrouf began attending the radical prayer centre in 2011.
“He never wants to come back. He wants nothing to do with Australia,” he said.
During the Hyde Park riot in late 2012, Sharrouf and Elomar led a mob of young Muslim radicals against police. Photos captured the pair standing side by side.
Elomar’s older brother Ahmed – also a champion boxer – was charged and later sentenced to at least 2½ years’ jail after bashing a police officer with a flag pole.
Sharrouf and Elomar attended Central Local Court to support Ahmed, refusing to stand for the magistrate. They shouted in Arabic when the magistrate did not grant bail.
The pain etched on Mamdouh Elomar’s face this week was that of a father who had tried to give his sons every opportunity in the world.
A self-made millionaire,
Mr Elomar last year denounced his son, saying his actions “make me want to vomit”.
For a time, Mohamed worked with the family business like his namesake before him. But, like his uncle, Elomar was lured to radical Islam.
The Elomar family patriarch had previously linked his sons’ spiral into extreme radicalism to time spent at the Global Islamic Youth Centre run by fast-talking firebrand Sheikh Feiz Mohammed.
In a 2007 interview – after Ahmed was arrested in Lebanon for alleged links
to a terror organisation – Mr Elomar attacked radical preachers.
“Sheikhs like Feiz ruin people,” he said. “He is not a sheik; he is brainwashing all these children. I know my religion, so I can tell him when he is wrong, but these kids believe everything he says and think it’s their religion. Someone needs to stop him.”
Despite their father’s intervention, the Elomar brothers continued their radical path, surpassing the man who baptised them to
the cause.
Earlier this year from Syria, Elomar posted a series of tweets attacking his former mentor, accusing him of working with spy agency ASIO. Feiz and Elomar fell out after the 2012 riot when the mentor described the behaviour of his former students as “unacceptable”.
“He openly said on TV that what happened in the Sydney protest was not Islam and rejected it,” Elomar claimed.
Elomar used his social media accounts to attack rival Australian jihadists, including Sydney Sheikh Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir, now a senior member of Al-Qa’ida affiliated terror group Jabhat al Nusra.
While Sharrouf and Elomar continued their selfish path to destruction, it was their wives and children who would ultimately pay.
After the pair made their way to Syria, Sharrouf’s family followed.
Tara Nettleton – an Islamic convert who had her first child with Sharrouf at 17 – travelled with their five children to Syria via Malaysia and Turkey.
The family settled in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, where they entertained foreign jihadists and put Yazidi slaves to work.
Elomar’s wife Fatima and their four children never made it, stopped at Sydney Airport in May, 2014, as they attempted to leave the country.
She will stand trial in November charged with supporting incursions into a foreign state with the intention of engaging in hostile activities, with counterterrorism police alleging she was carrying cash, camouflage equipment and medical supplies when she
was stopped.
Without his family in Syria, Elomar ranted on social media that he would need to divorce his wife and remarry.
In the interim, he raped and tortured Yazidi sex slaves, ISIS’s “spoils” of war.
In March, it was revealed Elomar had taken a second wife, Zaynab, the 14-year-old daughter of his best mate – a child he knew as a baby.
His downward spiral was coupled with a battle injury to his knee, which forced him to recuperate in Raqqa.
There he associated with other Australian jihadists who would ultimately lose their lives, including Melbourne pair Mahmoud Abdullatif and Suhan Rahman.
The trio posed in photos shared to social media, a popular past-time for Elomar, his new bride, and the widows of Abdullatif and Rahman.
ISIS recruiter Neil Prakash and Sydney teenager and apprentice butcher Abdullah Elmir continue the online ranting of their dead countrymen.
Through Twitter and Facebook accounts, Elomar continued to rage against Australia, attempting to recruit new ISIS members and urging supports to execute homegrown attacks.
But behind the bravado, Sharrouf and Elomar were becoming increasingly anxious, paranoia spurred after their BMW was blown-up in a rocket attack, apparently targeted.
Nettleton and her children too, were apparently unsettled and, in recent months, had expressed a desire to return to the safety of Australia.
Monash University terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton tells
Insight Elomar and Sharrouf had never planned what would
happen to their wives and young children should they be killed. Barton says it is unlikely, despite the esteem afforded to foreign fighters, the Sharrouf family would be granted a comfortable passage out of the Islamic State.
“Islamic State is very keen on social services and likes to tell girls going over that if they are widowed they will get the chance to marry another ISIS fighter,” he says.
“How that will go with Ms Nettleton, who is very ocker and not so malleable, is questionable.”
The Sharroufs are believed to be in Raqqa and Nettleton’s family is concerned talk about their desire to leave could put them at risk. Barton says it is essential to treat the issue of a potential return to Australia with sensitivity, especially in regard to the Sharrouf children.
“We are dealing with young children who have been taken into a horrible situation against their will and they really deserve our sympathy and, if possible, our help,” he says.
This week, in an unprecedented move, Nettleton’s mother, Karen Nettleton, made an impassioned plea to the Australian Government to help bring her daughter and grandchildren home.
“My silence and reluctance to speak publicly has been because of an unbearable fear that if I speak out, I may further endanger my family,” she said.
“This fear is tempered by a deeper fear that if I do not speak out and some other tragedy befalls them, I will not be able to live with myself. They want to come home.
“My daughter made the mistake of a lifetime. Today she is a parent alone in a foreign and vicious land looking after a widowed 14-year-old and four other young children.
“I accept that some will be critical of my daughter, who followed her heart and has paid an enormous price.
“I implore those people, including our Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, who is a man of faith, to remember John 8:7: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’.”
If they return, Nettleton would likely be arrested under anti-terror legislation.
And just how her children of terror, so-called “cubs of the caliphate”, could readjust to life in Australia remains to be seen.
For they have held death in their hands and witnessed horrors no child should ever see.
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