More than 30 British children in Syrian camps
Government urged to rescue young family from refugee camp after mother ‘coerced’ into leaving UK
MORE than 30 British children who grew up in the clutches of Isil are languishing in camps in Syria, including three young girls taken by their mother four years ago, an investigation by The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
The grandmother of the young girls last night pleaded with the Government to bring back the family after this newspaper told her that her daughter and grandchildren were still alive.
Charleen Jack-henry, 51, an NHS nurse from west London, spoke of her “relief ” that her three grandchildren, who were born in the UK, had survived the horrors of the Islamic State, though the fate of a fourth is not known.
She said: “My grandchildren are British. They were born here and should be back in this country.”
The Telegraph found the names of Nicole Jack, 32, and her three children – Naima, nine, Somaiya, seven, and Khadijah, five – on a camp registration document. The name of her eldest son, 12-year-old Isaac, is missing, raising fears he may have died.
An analysis of camp lists, coupled with information in the public domain, suggests at least 30 children born to British parents are in camps in Syria, twice the number previously thought. At least 12 are understood to have been born in the UK. The rest are entitled to citizenship through their mothers.
The disclosure will put pressure on the Government to make greater efforts to rescue British children.
Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, has revoked passports held by a number of Britons, including Shamima Begum, the 19-year-old from Bethnal Green. He has come under fire over the repatriation policy following the death of Ms Begum’s baby son in a camp last month.
‘I’m sure she travelled under duress from her husband because she didn’t want him to split her up from the children’
‘My grandchildren are British. Somebody in authority needs to go and fetch them back. They are the innocent ones in this’
Khadijah Ali was just one year old when her mother Nicole Jack took her off to join the so-called caliphate of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Her sister Somaiya was three, while Naima was six and their brother Isaac, the eldest, was only nine.
They were dragged from their home in west London in pursuit of their father Hussein Ali’s warped dream of a hard-line Islamist paradise on earth.
Today they languish with their mother in a bleak refugee camp in Syria, their father’s dreams in tatters and their future uncertain. The children’s grandmother has
now appealed for the Government to intervene and return the children, along with their mother, to the safety of the United Kingdom.
Charleen Jack-henry, a nurse of 26 years’ experience, has made a powerful plea for mercy, arguing that the children should not be made scapegoats for their parents’ extremism. She believes her daughter would have only left Britain with the children because Ali threatened to split up the family if she refused. Mrs Jack-henry says one of the children appeared to have torn up a family passport in a desperate attempt to prevent her mother taking them. But after replacing the document, Ms Jack went ahead and left Britain, travelling with Ali and the children to Cyprus in October 2015 before going on to Iraq and eventually Syria. Mrs Jack-henry has heard nothing since and feared they had been killed in the battle to defeat Isil.
Only now can The Daily Telegraph reveal that Ms Jack and the three girls are listed as alive, after being captured in Syria following the downfall of the terror group’s last bastion.
Their grandmother told this newspaper: “I have been desperate with worry about her and my grandchildren. I’m sure she only travelled under duress from her husband because she didn’t want him to split her up from the children.
“I think he must have told her his family would take them if she did not go out there with him.”
Nicole Jack, now 32, was raised in a loving environment after coming to Britain from Trinidad as a child with her mother.
A diligent pupil, she was studying international policy at Kingston University when she met Ali in 2005 while they were both working at a Pizza Hut in Hammersmith.
Despite Ali himself being a geology graduate, also from Kingston, their relationship put paid to any career ambitions Ms Jack may have had.
She abandoned her studies and, after converting to Islam and adopting the hijab, married Ali at a local mosque in 2006, going on to have Isaac, who would now be 12, and the three girls: Naima, now aged nine; Somaiya, seven, and Khadijah, five.
Ali, who was born in the United Arab Emirates of Somali origin, would frequently travel with Ms Jack to Somalia, as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where he had relatives.
But Mrs Jack-henry, 51, said she had no inkling that throughout this period her son-in-law was becoming increasingly radicalised.
She now believes that he may have turned to an extreme form of Islam after 2008, when he suffered a near-fatal suspected racist attack in Feltham, where he was raised with his brothers and a sister. The attack left him in intensive care and he only recovered after major neurosurgery to remove three blood clots on his brain.
As the marriage went on, Ali began imposing his hard-line Islamist ideology on his wife, including stopping the children attending the Notting Hill Carnival with their grandmother – a family ritual.
“Nicole always used to take part in carnival from when she was a child. It’s our culture. We make costumes for the parade and the children always took part. Naima especially loved it. She would dance and dance all the way down the street,” said Mrs Jack-henry, whose maisonette flat is decorated with Trinidadian carnival costumes.
“But Hussein didn’t approve of her or the kids taking part. If he didn’t like it, I don’t know why he married someone like that, instead of someone from his own culture. Why did he have to impose his beliefs on [her]? He told her what she could do and not do.”
Things took a turn for the worse after Ali travelled to Somalia on his own, sometime around 2015. According to Mrs Jack-henry he began to pressure his wife to join him.
“One day my younger daughter Michaela called me to say Nicole had rung her and was really upset, saying Hussein had told her she wasn’t virtuous,” she said.
“How could he say she was not virtuous when she was being a good mother? She was caring and providing for them.” Shortly after the incident, Mrs Jack-henry said Somaiya tore several pages out of Khadijah’s passport, almost as if she had overheard talk of the family having to travel overseas to join their father and was trying to sabotage the trip.
But it was to no avail. In October that year, Ms Jack and the children disappeared. A week later officers from the Metropolitan Police visited her home in Shepherd’s Bush to inform her that they had received information that Ms Jack and her husband had travelled to Cyprus and were believed to have gone onwards to Iraq to join Isil.
In desperation Mrs Jack-henry tried to contact her daughter online, but received no response.
Police officers even travelled to Trinidad to talk to a cousin of Ms Jack who had been in contact with her via social media. However, nothing more was heard from her, save for one missed phone call shortly after, on October 31, 2015.
Michaela, 19, a mechanical engineering student, said: “She rang me early one morning, but I was asleep and missed the call. When I rang back 30 minutes later there was no answer. That was the last I heard from my sister. I really miss her.”
Mrs Jack-henry says she does all she can to not simply give up.
“I have to compartmentalise or I wouldn’t be able to cope.
“She wasn’t an extremist and I never suspected Hussein had become an extremist like that,” she said. “He was devout, yes, but he didn’t seem to be an extremist.”
Now, speaking as a grandmother, Mrs Jack-henry has a heartfelt message for Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary.
“Please consider these cases on their merits,” she said. “I’m sure my daughter was coerced into going. Hussein used the children as leverage to force her to go out there with him. He seemed to use the influence of his family here to have a hold on her. She would not have left otherwise.
“I’m so worried about them, especially the children. I don’t understand why only three of them are listed in the camp. I’m worried Isaac was taken off to fight. I really pray they all of them are all right.”
Ms Jack is of dual British and Trinidadian nationality, allowing the Government to argue she would not be stateless if stripped of her citizenship.
But Mrs Jack-henry, whose husband is a soldier in Trinidad serving as a bodyguard for the country’s president, said: “My grandchildren are British. They were born here. Somebody in authority needs to go and fetch them back. They should be living here. They are the innocent ones in all this.
“This is not like the Shamima Begum case. I’m sure my daughter didn’t go there wanting to fight, but because she felt she had no choice if she wanted to keep her children.”
Mrs Jack-henry also emphasised she was willing to look after the children. “We all love them so much. They have to be with us here.”