Dr Jihad: How Perth’s Tareq Kamleh went from promiscuous party boy to Islamic State terrorist and recruiter

In April 2015, WA was rocked by revelations that young Perth doctor Tareq Kamleh had joined terrorist organisation Islamic State in Syria.

Photos of the then-29-year-old were splashed on front pages and colleagues and former university friends expressed shock as they learnt that the “womaniser” and “party boy” they remembered had appeared in a propaganda video for IS.

Cradling a newborn baby in the hospital run by terrorists, he told fellow medicos in Australia: “Please consider coming, please don’t delay.”

“I’m one of the medical team here in Raqqa. I made hijrah from Australia to the Islamic State to live under the khalifah.

“I saw this as my path to jihad for Islam to help the Muslim Ummah (community) in the area which I could which is the medical field.

“When I got here while I was very happy I made the decision, I was a little bit saddened at how long I delayed it, I wish I came here sooner.”

In response, the Australian Federal Police issued an arrest warrant for terrorism-related offences and the Medical Board of Australia suspended his registration.

The news of Kamleh’s recruitment was described at the time by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton as a “sickening development” in the fight against terrorism.

Kamleh was raised by a Palestinian father and German mother and attended Lynwood Senior High School.

He was registered as a doctor in Subiaco in 2010 and worked at Adelaide’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital and in Far North Queensland before returning to WA in 2013.

It was at this time, the AFP alleged in court documents from 2015, that his involvement with fundamentalist extremism began.

“Up until 2013, Kamleh was living a lifestyle not consistent with what would be described as a practising Muslim,” the AFP document said.

The documents accused him of recruiting for IS by appearing in its propaganda material and breaching other Federal anti-terror laws.

In the weeks before leaving for Syria, Kamleh attended a Thornlie mosque and claimed to have given up drinking and womanising for his faith.

Little was known about Kamleh’s movements after the initial video until almost two years later, when a sickening new video emerged.

In the July 2017 propaganda video, the bearded Kamleh — who called himself Abu Yousef Al-Australie — wielded an assault rifle as he advocated violence.

He urged Muslims to fight for their cause in the Middle East or Western nations, claiming that those who do not fight have “no honour” and “no love for fellow Muslims”.

“What more will it take for it to be (a) justified cause for you to come here to fight for Allah’s sake? And if you can’t make a way to come . . . jihad itself isn’t only in the lands of Syria or only in the lands of Iraq.”

The video appeared to be filmed in a cave or tunnel and was the first suggestion that Kamleh had survived two years of coalition air strikes and heavy fighting.

But one year later, reports emerged that Kamleh had been killed in the final battle of Raqqa in September 2017.

It is only now, almost a decade later, that the truth has emerged.

Kamleh is alive and being held in an Iraqi prison, one of 13 men linked to IS who are attempting to be returned to Australia.

He was also married to a fellow Islamic State member, an American woman who converted to Islam. Ariel Bradley was a devout evangelical Christian raised in Tennessee before embracing Islam in 2011. She joined ISIS in 2014 after marrying Iraqi man Yasin Mohammed.

The couple moved to Syria to join IS, with their daughter. She later had a son, Yaqub, before her husband died in a US airstrike in 2015.

Bradley then met and married Kamleh in Syria and gave birth to their son, Yousef, before the pair were reportedly killed in an air strike at a hospital in 2018.

Her daughter, Aminah, survived and was rescued from a refugee camp in Syria and repatriated to the US in 2021.

According to Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, Kamleh slipped out of Raqqa alongside ISIS fighters towards the border of Iraq in 2017.

He was allegedly arrested in the border town of Baghuz Fawqani, during the terror group’s final stand in Syria.

Kamleh is wanted by the AFP under an active warrant for terrorism offences including joining and recruiting for a banned terrorist organisation.

A government spokesperson said it had made clear it “will not provide any assistance to any Australian who made the horrific choice to lead a dangerous terrorist organisation”.

“The safety of the Australian community is this government’s highest priority,” they said.