Operation Jihadi Bride: My Covert Mission to Rescue Young Women from ISIS - The Incredible True Story

A thrilling and highly newsworthy military adventure in the burning rubble of Islamic State.


Would you turn your back on a teenage Jihadi bride and her innocent children?

'Jihad isn't a war. It's an objective. An aberration. If there are young women with children, lost boys... If they are trapped in that hell and we can get them out, don't we have a duty to do so? Every person we can bring back is living proof that Islamic State is a failure.'

Ex-British Army Soldier, John Carney, ran a close protection operation in Iraq for oil executives when he was asked by the family of a young Dutch woman to extract her from the collapsing Islamic State in Syria. Hearing first-hand of the shocking living hell of tricked naive young girls, many from the West, trapped, sexually abused and enslaved by ISIS, he knew only one thing - he had to get them out.

Armed with AK-47s and 9mm Glocks, he launched a daring, dangerous and deadly operation to free as many as he could. With a small band of committed Kurdish freedom fighters, backed by humanitarian NGOs, and feeding intel to MI6, Carney and his men went behind enemy lines in the heart of the Syrian lead storm, risking their lives to deliver the women and their children to the authorities, to de-radicalisation programmes and fair trials.

Gripping, shocking and thought-provoking, Operation Jihadi Bride takes the complex issue of the Jihadi brides head-on - a vital read for our troubled times.

John Carney is 42, modest, articulate and passionate. He served six years in the

Yorkshire Regiment and did two tours in Northern Ireland. He was a team leader in Iraq with Aegis Defence Services, the multi-million pound private security firm set up by Colonel Tim Spicer. He has operated a close protection service in Iraq since 2011 and currently organises de-radicalisation programmes on the Syrian/Turkish border. To protect his family, the name John Carney is a pseudonym. Names of his family and colleagues have been changed. Thanks to a lifetime habit of note-taking, the events described are real and accurate.

Clifford Thurlow has lived all over the world and has worked as a gem stone dealer, a foreign correspondent for TheObserver in Athens and as one of the team translating works from Tibetan into English for the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, where he wrote his first book, Stories from Beyond the Clouds, an anthology of Tibetan folk stories.

The winner of the London Arts Board New Millennium Prize for short fiction, he is best known as a ghostwriter, his most recent books being: Making A Killing, the inside story of a hired gun in Iraq, and Escape from Baghdad with Captain James Ashcroft; Fatwa, Living with a Death Threat, for Jacky Trevane, and Today I'm Alice for Alice Jamieson. Thurlow has published novels, short fiction, travel and has written for most national newspapers. He lives in both Chelsea and Cadaques, Spain, with the travel writer Iris Gioia.