Gailon Su and Su-lay Su

Gailon Su and Su-lay Su (sometimes spelled "Soulay" or "Sulay") are a mother and son from Trinidad and Tobago who, in September 2014, traveled to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant territory in Syria with Gailon's husband, Anthony Hamlet. Gailon and Su-lay escaped ISIL territory in December 2018 or January 2019 and surrendered to Syrian Democratic Forces. They are discussed in Simon Cottee's book Black Flags of the Caribbean: How Trinidad Became an ISIS Hotspot.

Recruitment and lives in the Islamic State In 2014, Gailon met a man from Chaguanas, Anthony Hamlet, and after a short courtship she converted to Islam to marry him and started wearing the hijab. Gailon’s teenage daughter, who lived with a relative, didn’t have time to meet Hamlet before the couple left Trinidad. Gailon was in her forties and had been separated from her children’s father, a Chinese national, for a decade. At the time of her marriage to Hamlet, her son Su-lay was 11 or 12 years old.

Hamlet was a devotee of Jamaican jihadist sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, whose disciples also included notorious terrorists like Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid. el-Faisal called non-Muslims "cockroaches" and advocated for "the bullet, not the ballot."

He told Gailon they were going on a trip to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Instead, they went to Syria, to ISIL territory. Su-lay later said he and his mother did not know they were being taken to Syria, and Gailon said she had been "tricked" into going. He went on to appear in official ISIL propaganda, including in the magazine Dabiq and in a recruitment video. Hamlet was physically abusive to Gailon, and forced his family to watch ISIL propaganda videos. In the spring of 2015, his six-year-old son shot and killed himself while imitating some of the ISIL videos he'd seen. Soon after, Gailon and Hamlet divorced in one of ISIL's sharia courts. He did not convert to Islam like his mother, and hid his Christian faith while in the ISIL caliphate. Gailon spoke on camera in the documentary The MatchMaker, which is about ISIL recruiter Tooba Gondal. Gailon has left Islam and is one of the few women in Al-Roj who do not wear an abaya.