Missing former Adelaide doctor Tareq Kamleh ‘loves ISIS’

A WOMAN who fled to Syria to support Islamic State has told how she met former Adelaide doctor Tareq Kamleh — who faces 25 years in jail.

A WOMAN who went to Syria to support the Islamic State has told how Australian doctor Tareq Kamleh, whom she knew as Abu Yusuf al-Australie, treated her son in the chaos of the Raqqa Public Hospital.

The woman, who was repatriated to Indonesia on a government-sponsored program in August after escaping from Raqqa, said of Kamleh: “He was not forced to this job. He loved ISIS very much, I think.”

Kamleh, 32, who has an Australian arrest warrant in his name and faces 25 years in prison should he return, is missing from the wreckage of Raqqa. He’s either killed, captured or has fled the terror capital that was retaken in recent weeks.

Indonesian woman Ummu Muhammad has returned home with her son. Picture: Ardiles Rante

Kamleh gained world attention in a 2015 ISIS propaganda video as a handsome and improbable young Western doctor, marketing state-of-the-art medical facilities at the Raqqa hospital to entice outsiders to the then-ascendant caliphate.

“Ummu Muhammad” — she asked to use a pseudonym because she says she has been threatened by ISIS back in Indonesia — said the video helped confirm her wish to live in the caliphate.

However, when she saw Kamleh in person for the first time late last year, he was gaunt, exhausted and heavily bearded, struggling to keep up with demands of patients in the besieged city.

Australian doctor Tareq Kamleh has called for jihad to be waged in the West.

Ummu, 32, also revealed that Kamleh — born in Perth, graduated in Adelaide and who worked in Queensland and Northern Territory hospitals, and whose conversion to extremism remains unexplained — had an English-speaking wife and new baby.

Kamleh told Ummu his son was three-months old. She could not be sure of his wife’s origins, because she was wearing a burqa.

Ummu, 32, presented at the hospital in November last year, after her two-year-old son developed a temperature and convulsions. Ummu, who speaks good English but not Arabic, sought out the Australian.

“I knew he was Australian, he’s very famous in Raqqa hospital,” said Ummu.

“It was a long queue at his clinic.

“He was the only paediatrician in Raqqa hospital who could speak English, so I came to him just like most muhajirins (emigrants to the caliphate) who can’t speak Arabic did.”

A dispirited Kamleh appeared in a second propaganda video in July, apparently sitting in a tunnel and nursing a rifle, complaining the Muslim world had abandoned ISIS in Syria.

Ummu said when she attended Raqqa hospital conditions were good. The medicine Kamleh prescribed for her son — iron and antibiotics — were available, but the city was being pounded.

“Almost every day we got air strikes, which wounded and killed civilians,” she said.

“It happened right before our eyes, inside our neighbourhood. And also at that time, many people in Raqqa suffered from flu, which spread everywhere and made everyone weaker.

“I asked him why he looked so tired. He said to me his working hours were very long, that he sometimes has to stay in hospital for days because so many children, especially babies, have emergency conditions.”

Ummu Muhammad says former Australian doctor Tareq Kamleh “still loves ISIS”. Picture: Ardiles Rante

Ummu did not ask Kamleh about his past life or conversion.

“He was the most educated doctor in Raqqa but unfortunately he still loves ISIS,” Ummu said. “I met him twice, when he told me my son had to do blood and urine tests, and when the result came I had to see him about prescriptions.

“I think he is a good doctor who was very caring about his patients. He was very friendly to everyone, but his Australian accent was very hard to understand. His explanations (about her son’s condition) were very detailed, not like other doctors in that hospital.”

Ummu said ISIS cared “only for muhajirin willing to go fight for them or help them in the battlefield but as for muhajirin who came to the area only to be civilians living in the caliphate, they ignore us. Civilians have to pay for medical services but for ISIS it was free.”

Ummu is now in temporary accommodation in south Jakarta. Her husband, who never made it to Syria after being detained in Turkey, is in a Jakarta cell.

“It’s a long story but we were deceived by ISIS propaganda,” she said.

“It was our huge mistake and we regret every moment. What we can do now is repent and hope Allah the Most Forgiving forgives all our sins and wrongdoings.”

She was one of a group of 19 who claim to have hid under tunnels on the outskirts of Raqqa for months during air raids. They used a smuggler to get to Kurdistan, after which the Indonesian government collected them.

Kamleh has reportedly said he would never return to Australia. If captured alive, that decision may be out of his hands.

Originally published as Missing former Adelaide doctor Tareq Kamleh ‘loves ISIS’