The 12-year-old son of the so-called “White Widow,” a punk rocker-turned-jihadist killed by a US drone strike in Syria, did not die with his mom — and is now training with ISIS, according to a report.
Sally Jones, who became the UK’s most wanted woman after joining ISIS, was killed when the convoy she had been traveling in was struck by a CIA Reaper drone in June.
Her son, Joe “JoJo” Dixon, was about 35 miles away in the village of al-Shaafa along the Euphrates river, near Syria’s eastern border with Iraq, at the time of the strike, witnesses told The Telegraph.
JoJo, who was given the Islamic moniker Hamza, trained for several months in ISIS’ “cubs of the caliphate” camps in northern Syria early last year.
He had been separated from his mom since her husband, Junaid Hussein, was killed in a 2015 raid. When he turned 12 in December, ISIS drafted him into its ranks, two sources told The Telegraph.
The boy was last seen three weeks ago in al-Shaafa, where he was living in a house with other Western children, according to the paper.
A photograph obtained by the paper shows the junior jihadist wearing an Afghan-style smock during training last year in Raqqa, the erstwhile capital of ISIS in northern Syria.
“Foreign fighters, mostly Turkish, took Joe and some other foreign children from Raqqa to Deir Ezzor province in April to protect them as they are the future of the caliphate,” a resident of al-Shaafa who recently fled told the paper by phone.
“They weren’t using them as human shields, as some people say, because the presence of children does not stop the coalition from bombing,” the resident said.
Jones, a 50-year-old from Kent, converted to Islam and fled to Syria in 2013 to marry Hussain, a computer hacker and ISIS fighter from Birmingham.
The prolific recruiter for the terror group is believed to have persuaded hundreds of British women to work for ISIS, and in 2016 called on female sympathizers in the UK to carry out terrorist attacks.