![]() Yet often they come to regret their credulity, realising that their journalist-interlocutor is not, in Janet Malcolm’s words, the “permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother” they’d imagined, but “the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father”. Why would you willingly expose yourself to a cold-hearted stranger with a story to tell? Of course, Wright knows all-too-well why people talk to reporters: because they want to be heard and understood, because they enjoy the attention and feel important, and because they want to shape or control the narrative about themselves. “It’s a mystery why anybody talks to a reporter,” Lawrence Wright has observed. The film’s title self-consciously appropriates Gondal’s tabloid name (“the Isis matchmaker”), but there’s nothing remotely sensationalist or cheap about the film. The film is about Gondal, who, in her incarnation as Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia, sought to enlist foreign women and girls to Isis, where they would become the wives of the male fighters. Last month, Benedetta Argentieri’s documentary The Matchmaker premiered at the Venice Film Festival. #Unherd voices full#It was innocuous enough, but there it was: a casual reference to her father by his full name. But she couldn’t do anything about that tweet from an earlier account she had used before she became an Isis true believer. She was a savvy operator on social media and had revealed little about her personal life in her numerous pro-Isis Twitter accounts. Her name was Tooba Gondal, a then 21-year-old from East London. She was terrifying, tormented and terrible. I’d been tracking her for months, almost marvelling at her shamelessness: she had posted pictures of herself brandishing an AK-47 on social media she had justified the beheading of Western aid-workers she had celebrated the 2015 Paris attacks and she had scolded other Muslim women for not covering their faces (and eyes). Back in early 2015, she was a brazen British propagandist and recruiter for the Islamic State. I’ll never forget the moment I uncovered Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia’s real name. ![]()
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