Return of jihadi brides
How a schoolgirl from Bethnal Green was groomed into an ISIS bride callous beyond belief...
THE former schoolgirl from London’s Bethnal Green sits solemnly in a bare room in the Syrian refugee camp where she was found hiding this week. It is almost exactly four years since Shamima Begum, now 19, and two classmates ran away to become ‘jihadi brides’.
Today, Begum is a woman hardened by a forced marriage to a Dutch jihadi fighter, the deaths of two children from malnutrition and illness, and life under the tyrannical Islamic State.
Nine months pregnant with a third child by the Dutch fighter, who has now disappeared, she says: ‘I just could not endure any more. Now all I want to do is come home to Britain. I was frightened that the child I am about to give birth to would die like my other children if I stayed on. So I fled the caliphate.’
THE PLOT TO FLEE
When Begum left to join IS with friends from Bethnal Green Academy – 15-year-old Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, 16 – they plotted their departure with cynical precision.
They stole jewellery from their families and sold it to fund their secret half-term flight to Turkey in February 2015.
They lied to their devout Muslim families about why they had to go out that weekday morning. One girl said she was going to work at school, another that she had a wedding to go to.
One of three children in a family of Bangladeshi immigrants, Shamima Begum is thought to have travelled under the name of her sister Aklima, who is two years older, to avoid scrutiny at the airport gates from police over her young age.
SMUGGLED INTO SYRIA
After arriving in Istanbul, the girls took a bus to the Syrian border, where a people smuggler guided them into IS-controlled territory. They were taken to a ‘woman’s house’ and each married off to foreign fighters within three weeks.
In camera phone footage, which has emerged from IS, the Bethnal Green trio are shown trudging through a snowy landscape to load their bags into a car.
They slipped into IS territory and disappeared – until Begum dramatically reappeared, having been found by The Times, registered as number 28,850, among 39,000 other refugees at a Syrian al-Hawl holding camp near the last desperate redout of the remaining few hundred IS fighters.
She may sound sorry for herself and her unborn baby now. But the truth is that Begum, and her fellow jihadi brides, were well on the road to radicalisation before they left British soil.
Abase had gone to radical Islamic protests in London with her father, and Begum had been in touch with a female IS recruiter online before she left the UK.
All three had attended meetings at a hardline Islamic women’s group which preached the virtues of IS and was an offshoot of the local mosque.
Friends at Bethnal Green Academy have told of how the three girls changed as they became devotees of IS.
The three formed a ‘clique’. They began wearing the hijab to school and talking about the fighting in Syria. They also started to badmouth their non-Muslim classmates, calling them ‘slags’ and ‘kaffirs’, an Arabic term of abuse for an infidel or non-believer. The trio sent their classmates a computer video link claiming that Israelis were deliberately burning Palestinian children in the Gaza strip.
THE IS RECRUITERS
Begum was using her Twitter account to contact a former medical student called Aqsa Mahmood, a 21-year-old who left Glasgow for Syria in 2014 to join IS.
The Glaswegian was a prolific blogger and recruiter for Islamic state, praising their terror attacks online. She was thought to be a leading light in the al-Khansaa Brigade, an all-female group enforcing strict Sharia law rules on women and children in IS territory.
Her parents, who still live in Glasgow, do not know if she is alive.
Begum was also ‘following’ 70 other IS terrorists from around the world – both male and female – on Twitter.
But nearer home, there was another influence on Shamima Begum. It came from another teenager, Sharmeena Begum, who is not a relation but a 15-year-old school pal and another jihadi bride. Sharmeena disappeared from the UK on a Saturday morning in December 2014 flying from Gatwick, apparently on her own, to Turkey before crossing the border into Syria with the help of IS fighters.
The teenager’s family had allowed her to open a bank account with cash gifts given to her to mark the recent loss of her mother, a tradition in her Bangladeshi community. She withdrew £1,000 to fund her flight and told her family she was going to extra school classes on a Saturday morning before taking the flight to Turkey.
Now the police believe that Sharmeena Begum’s successful escape to join IS encouraged Shamima Begum and the other two to follow her.
Sharmeena met up with her three friends at Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London, the evening before flying from Gatwick. She bought a new iPhone and summer clothes suitable for a hotter climate.
Meanwhile, it has transpired that a fifth girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, also planned to join IS as a jihadi bride from Tower Hamlets.
She attempted to leave for Syria on a plane from Heathrow on the same Saturday in December 2014 that Sharmeena left. The girl’s parents alerted the police in time, the plane was stopped by police on the runway and she was removed from the flight.
LIFE IN THE CALIPHATE
As for Shamima Begum today, she is close to giving birth and still