Tania Joya

Tania Joya (born 1983) is a British-American former jihadi and current counter-extremism activist. In 2013, she fled Syria after traveling there with husband John Georgelas to join the Islamic State. In 2022, she asserted that she had an extramarital romantic relationship with US Representative Van Taylor, who subsequently acknowledged having a relationship and dropped out of a Texas runoff election.

Early life Joya was born as Joya Choudhury in Harrow, north London, UK in 1983 to a "culturally Muslim" Bangladeshi family. Her father worked for an airline while her mother ran a catering business. She claimed to experience racism while growing up in London, being called a Paki. When she was around seven years old, her father was laid off and started working odd jobs. She struggled with dyslexia. Her mother started fostering children.

Adult life In 2003, at an anti-war protest in London she was given a piece of paper with a link to a Muslim-dating website, she went on the website and met John Georgelas, a Greek-American who had recently converted to Islam shortly after the September 11 attacks. After two weeks, she fled Syria, and sought US permission to return to the US, and attended a Unitarian Universalist church.

In June 2018, Joya divorced Georgelas and remarried.

In March 2022, Joya was living in Plano, and was training to become a hypnotherapist. She works with Faith Matters, a counter-extremism group in the UK, In 2019, she urged the British public to show mercy to Shamima Begum. Saying she met Taylor at a jihadi reprogramming session, In a statement to The Dallas Morning News, Joya said she was "annoyed at having to see her ex-lover's face on billboards" and approached Taylor's Republican opponent Suzanne Harp, hoping that Harp would privately persuade Taylor to drop out of the race, but Taylor did not do so, prompting Joya to make her allegations public.

In popular culture The 2022 Discovery+ documentary A Radical Life presents the story of Joya and her ex-husband, John Georgelas (aka "Yahya al-Bahrumi").

Family She is the mother of four children. She was pregnant with her fourth child when she fled Syria.