Australian jihadi bride Janai Safar says she refuses to return home with her son

An Islamic State bride who left Australia is adamant she won’t return, saying she fled because “women are naked on the street” here.

An Islamic State bride says she won’t return home to Australia because she doesn’t want her son seeing naked women on the streets.

Janai Safar, 24, left the country to join the jihadi terror group in 2015. She is currently living in a refugee camp in northern Syria after its defeat.

But unlike British bride Shamima Begum, the former nursing student Safar stresses she has no desire to return home.

“It was my decision to come here to go away from where women are naked on the street,” she told The Australian. “I don’t want my son to be raised around that.

“I don’t regret coming to Syria. I don’t regret living under ­Islamic State.”

Safar said she and a cousin, who she only identified as Aylam, joined the group four years ago after researching material online and then fled without informing their families.

She said her life now consists of staying at home in Raqqa and looking after her child.

The woman said she fears being imprisoned if she returns to the country, based on the Australian government’s new law imposing a 10-year jail term on those who travel to IS territory.

Samer Safar, father of Janai Safar, wants his daughter to come back to Australia. Picture: Hollie Adams/The Australian

Safar’s father, Samer, told the newspaper that while his daughter was “stubborn”, he was sure she wanted to come back to Australia.

“I know my daughter,’’ the 55-year-old told The Australian. “She’s stubborn. She doesn’t want to show she’s fallen. But at the end of the day Australia is her country.’’

“If I got a feeling she was going to do that I wouldn’t have let her go,’’ he added. “They’re crazy. A real Muslim doesn’t believe that. I’m a Muslim. I’m proud. They’re giving us a bad name.”

The issue of how to deal with returning jihadi brides has been a talking point around the world in recent weeks, after Shamima Begum had her British citizenship revoked.

The mother of a newborn baby, who fled London at 15 to become a jihadi bride in Syria, sparked outrage among the British public after she appeared to be unrepentant.

In a tense BBC interview, Begum was called on to apologise for her actions, but she struggled to decry the actions of IS.

“It’s a two-way thing really,” she said. “Because women and children are being killed in the Islamic State right now.”

She also said the murder of 22 music fans in the Manchester Arena suicide bombing was “fair justification” for air raids on IS in Syria.

Unlike Safar, however, Begum was desperate to return home to the UK. “I can’t live in this camp forever, it’s just not possible,” she said.

Earlier this month, a 24-year-old jihadi bride from Melbourne — who once boasted that she would only return to Australia when it was “part of the Islamic State” — begged to return home.

Zehra Duman told an American humanitarian worker she was desperate to come home, the Daily Mail reported.

“I want to go back to my country,” the woman believed to be Duman said. “I think everybody’s asking for that because I’m an Australian citizen.

“My kids have a right to be treated like normal kids. I understand the anger that they have towards a lot of us here, but the kids don’t need to suffer.”