IT’S not often you see a mother respond to news of her son’s death both with heartache and overwhelming relief.
But nor do you often see a mother like Sally Evans, whose son Thomas Evans fled his home in England to join a terrorist organisation in Somalia.
Tonight, Ten will screen the acclaimed UK documentary My Son The Jihadi, which follows Thomas’ remarkable transformation from a happy little kid to a murderous terrorist, and Sally’s heartache as she helplessly watches on from a distance.
The Project’s Waleed Aly, who will present tonight’s screening with co-host Carrie Bickmore, said one of the most extraordinary things about Thomas’ story was how ordinary it was to begin with.
“You’re struck by how ordinary he is and then how unusual the situation he ends up in is,” Aly told news.com.au.
“Imagine what his mum goes through when she finds out that he’s gone off and joined a terrorist group in Somalia. She’s trying to reconcile this thing, where it’s like, ‘This is what my son has become, but at the same time he’s still this kid that I brought up’.
“There are pictures of paintings he drew in kinder up around her house and it’s like, how is this the same person?”
Thomas was just 21 when he became the first white British person to join Al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group that was responsible for the 2013 terrorist attack on Westgate Mall in Kenya.
He began training with the group in Somalia just two years after converting to Islam, changing his name Abdul Hakim and fleeing his home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire to learn Arabic in Egypt.
It was that part of the story that what initially inspired the film’s creators. Their documentary begins as Sally and her other son, Michael, grapple with Thomas’ disappearance and wait desperately to hear from him — or what has become of him.
But as the cameras roll over nine long months, the film also captures incredible developments as they happen.
It shows Sally making contact with the mother of Thomas’ Somalian child bride, and the two women forging a strange bond over their children’s radicalisation.
And it also captures the heart-wrenching moment Sally learns, by way of grainy footage uploaded on Twitter, that Thomas had been killed.
“Imagine discovering the death of your child on Twitter and being both devastated and relieved,” Sally says in the documentary.
“Devastated because the child you brought into this world was killed after being brainwashed into pursuing a murderous cause, but relieved because the death of your child meant he could no longer harm innocent people.”
Aly said it was impossible not to feel affected by Sally’s inner turmoil.
“You see her come to terms with was her son was actually doing over there and the atrocities he committed and what that means for her. And there’s also his brother as well — they grew up together and suddenly he’s become a different person, and all those photos you look back on of the kids playing together are tinged with a completely different meaning.
“I think what’s so interesting about the documentary is that it kind of presents all these contradictions to you. The contradictions she feels as someone who’s ashamed of her son but nonetheless has a mother’s love and concern for her son.
“And the contradictions for you as the audience looking at this guy and seeing he’s just a kid and he’s dead, and you’re sad about his death for a moment because you see the impact it has on his family, and then you’re reminded of what he did.”
Much of the film focuses on what was behind Thomas’ radicalisation. He had been a happy child, and his non-religious upbringing was a far cry from the hard line jihadism he later lived and died for.
But there were key moments in his life in England on which things may have started to turn: the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, a particularly bad breakup with a girlfriend and the loss of his job, which was partly because of his appearance as a newly converted Muslim.
Sally Evans, holding a photo of Thomas, with her other son Michael.Source:Channel 10
“In the film there’s a guy that Sally ends up getting some help from who works in deradicalisation and there’s this really interesting scene where he’s actually plotting Thomas’ life to see what when wrong,” Aly said.
“There’s a little penny-dropping moment in that where you go, oh god — you can sort of see the connect.
“To me it’s a story of someone who’s cut loose, who feels they don’t belong anywhere and who’s been rejected by society, and then from his perspective is rescued by another group of people who are there to help him — and it just so happens those people were exactly the wrong group of people.
“The story is entirely analogous. It’s the same story that is being played out in Australia at the moment. We’ve had over a hundred, possibly two hundred and maybe even more young kids go off to Syria to fight and some of those kids are coming from Muslim families and some of them are not, and I think that’s one of the things that’s so remarkable about this story: it’s the ordinariness it presents.
“You’d be hard-pressed to watch this and think quite simply, ‘That could not be my family’. And I think what we learn from it is that this phenomenon of radicalisation is such a big social problem. It expresses itself as violence and political violence particularly, but it’s much more layered than that.”
Tomorrow night, Sally will return to our screens for an exclusive interview with Aly and his co-stars on The Project.
Thomas and Michael as children. Picture: Sally Evans.Source:Supplied
Her willingness to share her experiences makes her very much at odds with many parents of terrorists, who are mostly reluctant to go public, the documentary’s producer Richard Kerbaj, told news.com.au last month.
“They feel a great sense of isolation, they’re embarrassed, they feel if they speak out the authorities might crack down on them or crack down on their children and they live in the hope their children will return,” he said.
“She (Sally) was the first mum in the UK to speak out about her son becoming a jihadist. Secular mum, white background, no cultural or religious reference points to Islam … she had no idea about this stuff.
“This is such a special story because her voice is so unique … There is no PR sense to her. She just speaks her mind.”
Aly agreed that Sally’s voice was a unique and very important one.
“I've never seen something like that before and I get the sense she really believes her story can shed a light on something that might in some way help other parents, or policymakers, or society. It’s pretty remarkable that she’s been prepared to do that,” he said.
“I promise you, you’ll watch this and at the end of this you won’t be able to just get up and put on an episode of Modern Family or something. You’ll need a moment to process it.”
My Son The Jihadi, presented by Waleed Aly and Carrie Bickmore, is on tonight (Tuesday) at 9.30pm on Ten.
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