Swedish Teacher Sends Armed Security Personnel To Rescue Yazidi PhD Student From ISIS In Iraq

We read about teachers helping their students in difficult times. But jumping into a war stricken zone to free a student from IS terrorism all sounds like too good to be true. Perhaps some countries do not need any kind of Good Samaritan law to perform good deeds.

Charlotta Turner, a chemistry professor at Lund University, Sweden, received a message from her student Firas Jumaah in 2014 that if he didn¡¯t return within a week to Sweden then the professor should count him out of the doctoral course.

This was at a time when ISIS was involved in the mass killing and rape of thousands of Yazidis in northern Iraq. In 2014 Islamic State jihadists tried to erase their faith. The Economist reported that roughly 10,000 Yazidis were massacred out of total global Yazidi population of 5,00,000.

Photo: Lund University/Firas Jumaah and Charlotta Turner

Jumaah and his family were hiding in a disused bleach factory, when IS were firing gun shots and carrying out a war crime. He decided to message his teacher because he felt no hope that he will come out of that place alive. But little did he know about the wonder Ms. Turner could perform. Jumaah was pursuing his research in Sweden under the guidance of Turner. He suddenly disappeared to Iraq as LUM states where his wife and children had gone to attend a wedding.

When he heard about the war that had broken out in that area he rushed to be with his family.

Turner couldn¡¯t leave his student to die and decided to contact the then Security Chief Per Gustafson.

Photo: Lund University/ Per Gustafson

"What was happening was completely unacceptable," she told LUM. "I got so angry that IS was pushing itself into our world, exposing my doctoral student and his family to this, and disrupting the research."

Turner didn¡¯t expect such swift response from Gustafson. "It was almost as if he'd been waiting for this kind of mission," Turner said. "Per Gustafson said that we had a transport and security deal which stretched over the whole world."

The chief dispatched a team of mercenaries with heavily armed vehicles and made their way to the factory where Jumaah and his family were hiding. They were rescued and sent to the Erbil airport from where they flew home with anonymous airline tickets.

Photo: Lund University/ Charlotta Turner

After coming back to Sweden, Jumaah not only completed his PhD thesis, but has also been granted a permanent residence permit. He now works at a pharmaceutical company in Malmo. Rawya Hussein has taken her master of chemistry and is looking for a job. The children are eight and ten years old and enjoy school and football in Lund.

He told the LUM magazine "Lund University was my most important school. We learned so much more than researching, we were prepared to be good people.¡± Meanwhile, Turner believes that researching is actually a peace project that unites people from all over the world.