Former glamour model Kimberley Miners has told how she was targeted by Islamic State ISIS on Facebook — then groomed to become the successor to White Widow Sally Jones. Kimberley, 29, was indoctrinated online by IS recruiter Naweed Hussain and ended up sharing dozens of horrific propaganda images and videos.
She was arrested after MI5 intercepted messages from Hussain in which he urged her to join him in Syria. Once there, IS planned to use her as a new version of Jones, the brainwashed British terrorism mouthpiece killed in an air strike.
Kimberley, released after security chiefs realised she had been duped, said yesterday: “I was totally taken in. I was groomed and I fell for it.
“I was a propaganda trophy to be won, the next Sally Jones. And they wanted me at all costs. I dread to think what would have happened. “Hussain lavished me with attention and flattery and even persuaded me to change my name to Aisha Lauren al-Britaniya because it was more authentic.
“He’d say, ‘If you came here I’ll make you my wife’. We swapped hundreds of messages every day.”
After her arrest Kimberley learned that Hussain, 32, originally from Coventry, was also grooming up to ten other British women as jihadis.
Two weeks ago one of them, 18-year-old Safaa Boular, became the youngest woman to be convicted of planning a UK terror attack.
Kimberley, speaking for the first time of her ordeal, said: “I could so easily have been Safaa Boular. I’m lucky I was arrested when I was.”
Hussain first got in touch after IS spotted that Kimberley had been using social media to highlight the plight of children caught up in the Syrian civil war.
On the surface she was an unlikely IS recruit. She was brought up in the affluent Low Moor area of Bradford and left school with nine GCSEs before getting a job with her local council.
At 18 she did her first glamour modelling shoot. By 2015 she was engaged to a millionaire and pregnant. But she lost the baby because of a rare complication. Her fiance dumped her soon after.
So when Hussain, who used the name Abu Usamah Al-Britani with IS, got in touch Kimberley was in an emotionally vulnerable state.
She felt friendless and unloved — and was ripe for manipulation.
Kimberley said: “My hopes and dreams had been shattered. I was all alone having just lost my baby and my fiance.“I hadn’t been on social media for ages because my fiance didn’t like it. But I went back on and that’s where it all began. “I was upset by what was happening in Syria to the children. I wanted to do something to help.
“I started sharing videos of bomb attacks in the hope of showing people what was going on. “I soon started receiving lots of friend requests from people in Syria. They’d message me on Facebook. “It’s embarrassing now but I liked the attention. I’d been so lonely. Now I felt I finally belonged.
“I craved the attention, the respect and the offers of friendship. “There were girls in Britain and in Syria, IS fighters, jihadi brides. I’d speak to them all every single day.”
In October 2016, Kimberley was returning to her Bradford home when anti-terror officers and MI5 pounced.
She discovered they had all her messages to and from Hussain and material he sent her — including a bomb-making manual
