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Australian Woman Denounces Video of Grandson Threatening to Stage Attacks | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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ISIS militant Khaled Sharrouf and his children in a video. (Asharq Al-Awsat)


Sydney- An Australian grandmother of a young boy filmed being coached to kill Australians has lashed out at his ISIS militant father Khaled Sharrouf for using him as a media tool.

Karen Nettleton said that her daughter Tara left Australia with her children for Syria in 2013 to join her husband.

“Everybody out there is going to see it and think he’s a little terrorist. I don’t know how his father could have done it to him. I really don’t understand that,” the grandmother told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Hamze was the baby out of all of them. I rocked him to sleep, I sang him songs and I took him swimming,” she said.

Nettleton has been fighting for three years to bring her five grandchildren – three boys and two girls – back to Australia, and insisted they were not lost to ISIS.

“They’re not lost, they’re not gone. They’re just kids, with the right help they will be okay,” she added.

The ABC said the video had been made by Sharrouf – once thought killed in a drone strike – with the aim of selling it to Australian media, but there were no takers.

It was accompanied by a photo which showed the boy in front of a strung-up corpse of a man in an orange jumpsuit with a poster round his neck saying he was a traitor.

Justice Minister Michael Keenan slammed the appalling use of a child in extremist propaganda. “The Australian government condemns this truly appalling act of using a child to espouse ISIS terrorist messaging,” he said.

Canberra lifted its terror threat alert level in September 2014 and introduced new national security laws amid concerns of attacks by individuals inspired by extremist organizations such as ISIS.

It also cracked down on Australians attempting to travel to conflict zones including Syria and Iraq.