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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Kaleidoscope -> 
Professor hired mercenaries to save student
    2018-12-18  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

FEW students can name a professor willing to go the extra mile to ensure their students finish their studies. Fewer still can say their teacher hired an elite team of mercenaries to save you so you can finish your Ph.D.

But a chemistry professor from Sweden did exactly that to rescue a student and his family from ISIS in Iraq.

Charlotta Turner, a professor at Lund University, in the city of the same name, took the unprecedented action after she received a text message in 2014 from her student Firas Jumaah, saying it was unlikely he would be able to finish his research due to threats from the terror group.

“What was happening was completely unacceptable,” Turner told the university magazine LUM four years later. ”I got so angry that IS [Islamic State] was pushing itself into our world, exposing my doctoral student and his family to this, and disrupting the research.”

Jumaah told the professor to assume he would not be able to finish his thesis if he did not return within a week, because he was stuck in an Iraqi town being surrounded and shelled by Islamic State militants.

Jumaah and his family were particularly in danger because they are part of the Yazidi ethnoreligious group that was subject to brutal treatment by ISIS, who often tortured or murdered the men and sold women into sex slavery.

He voluntarily entered the war zone after his wife in the area told him that ISIS had taken over a nearby village, massacring the men and enslaving women, according to The Local.

The threat of danger prompted the professor to take matters into her own hands and contact the university’s then-security chief Per Gustafson, who hired a security company, which then arranged the rescue operation.

“It was almost as if he’d been waiting for this kind of mission,” Turner said. “He said that we had a transport and security deal which stretched over the whole world.”

A few days later two Land Cruisers carrying four heavily armed mercenaries roared into the vicinity of an abandoned bleach factory where Jumaah was hiding, and sped him away to Erbil Airport together with his wife and two children.

“I have friends who later thought I’m a secret agent, they cannot believe that a professor in Lund had the power to pick up a regular doctoral student,” Jumaah said.

The rest of family survived the Daesh occupation, while Jumaah completed his Ph.D. back in Sweden. He and his family now live in Malmo, Sweden. The family has finished paying the university back for the rescue operation.   (SD-Agencies)

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