Badass College Professor Hires Mercenaries to Rescue Her Student from ISIS

Military Times – Some educators genuinely care about their pupils. … Then there’s Charlotta Turner, a professor of analytical chemistry at Sweden’s Lund University, who, upon learning that one of her doctoral students was in hiding in an Islamic State war zone, dispatched a heavily-armed mercenary squad to rescue the student and his family.

Firas Jumaah was completing a doctorate thesis under Turner in 2014 when he received a terrifying text message from his wife, who was home in northern Iraq with the couple’s two young children: ISIS fighters had captured an adjacent Yazidi village and were killing the men and enslaving the women. … After arriving in Iraq and reuniting with his panicked family, Jumaah packed up some of their belongings and moved them to a hideout in an abandoned bleach factory. …

Amidst the chaos, Jumaah sent a text message to Turner. … “I was desperate. I just wanted to tell my supervisor what was happening. I had no idea that a professor would be able to do anything for us.”

But Turner is not just any professor. And as the saying goes, “Those who can, do. Those who cannot, hire mercenaries to get Jumaah the hell out of there.” …

Desperate to help, Turner contacted Lund University’s security chief, Per Gustafson … and the two college employees collaborated to hire a mercenary team from a security company that put the rescue mission together in less than a week.

“It was almost as if [Gustafson had] been waiting for this kind of mission,” Turner said.

In a matter of days, four mercenaries — armed to the teeth — rolled up to the bleach factory, loaded Jumaah and his family into the vehicles and hightailed it to Erbil Airport, approximately 55 miles east of Mosul. …

With his wife and children safe, Jumaah returned to Sweden and completed his PhD. He currently lives in Malmo.

Turner remains a professor at Lund University, where her badassery knows no bounds.

I make fun of college professors quite a bit. So do a lot of us here. But that’s mostly because they are crying out to be made fun of. By its nature, the world of academics is an ivory tower that attracts the kind of people with a genius for stating problems but with no talent for solving. People who get paid great money to live their whole lives in the warm, soft luxury of theory, without ever having to produce results by actually doing.

Well that obviously doesn’t not apply to Charlotta Turner. A lesser professor of analytical chemistry would’ve heard about the Jumaah’s family plight, said “This calls for immediate action!” Then scheduled a meeting of the department heads to issue a peer-reviewed article calling for a greater understanding of what the role of ethnocentric western capitalist nations was in creating misogyny in the region and how we can foster a better dialogue with ISIS through an increase in the use of renewable energy. Then she would’ve called it a day and stopped by the artisan cheese shop on the way home to her mansion.

But Charlotta Turner is not your average academic. ISIS fucked with one of her own and she put together a crack team of commandos to fuck with them right back only a thousand times worse. The only thing that could’ve made this better is if she went full Ripley, stripping down to a tank top and combat pants and boots, arming herself to the teeth and leading that mission right alongside Per Gustafson. Maybe used her knowledge of chemistry to make bombs and booby traps and shit to blow those ISIS punks to their 72 virgins, McGyver-style. I mean, they were in a bleach factory, after all.

Though this will do. Firas Jumaah and his wife and kids are safe, thanks to Turner. She’s the kind of educator you want to complete your thesis under. The kind you know will keep her head when everything goes sideways and you need someone to have your six. Let’s just give her the Nobel Prizes in chemistry and in peace right now. Because by God, she is my kind of professor.