British Islamic State twin alive in Syria
Zahra Halane, who joined terror group as a teenager, has been moved to a new high-security facility
A woman from Manchester who joined the Islamic State as a teenager with her twin sister is alive and confined in a detention camp in northeast Syria, The
Daily Telegraph can disclose. Zahra and Salma Halane gained notoriety as the “terror twins” when they ran away from home in 2014 to live in the caliphate. Until now it had not been known whether they survived the final fighting at Baghouz last year between the remnants of IS and the Westernbacked Syrian Democratic Forces.
A WOMAN who left Britain to join Islamic State (IS) as a teenager alongside her twin sister is being held with her young son in a detention camp run by Syrian Kurdish forces, sources have confirmed.
Zahra Halane was recently caught trying to escape from the Al Hol camp, where she had lived for 16 months, and was transferred last week to a new high-security extension to Roj camp, where humanitarians worry the most dangerous IS supporters are being moved, sources in the camps said.
She and her sister Salma were 16 when they fled their home in Chorlton, Manchester, in June 2014 to travel to Syria, but their whereabouts had not been known since IS lost the last of its territory to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in March 2019.
Salma is also believed to be alive but her location is not known.
Women in Al Hol say that the pair, who were referred to as the “terror twins” in the media, remain committed IS supporters.
The fact that their presence went unreported and that at least one of them attempted to escape illustrates the danger of leaving tens of thousands of jihadists under the guard of a militia in a war-torn country, experts say.
The twins, who moved to Manchester at a young age from Denmark, crossed into Syria in July 2014, shortly after IS declared a caliphate. Their elder brother had reportedly travelled to Syria the year before. The sisters moved to Raqqa, the caliphate’s capital, and married IS fighters.
Their youth and apparent enthusiasm for life under IS attracted widespread attention, and their journey was later copied by the Bethnal Green trio – teenage girls, from an academy in London, of whom only Shamima Begum is known to have survived.
By early 2019, the caliphate was reduced to a small pocket of territory outside Baghouz, in eastern Syria. While tens of thousands of supporters, including Ms Begum, surrendered to the Western-backed SDF, many remained missing.
Ms Begum’s classmates Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana are believed to have died, but others without identification entered the camps, where there was little to stop them giving partial or incorrect biographical information.
Last month, Russia Today Arabic aired an interview with a woman The Daily Telegraph has identified as Zahra Halane after she was caught trying to escape from Al Hol, where some 10,000 foreign women and children live in cramped and unsanitary conditions in an annexe separate from the 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi citizens in the camp.
“I want to go back home,” the woman says in Arabic. “If you have money, there are different ways [of escaping] and it happens very fast. You can get to Turkey easily.”
A network of corrupt guards and drivers using hidden compartments inside water tankers has developed to traffic people from Al Hol into Turkey. The cost is about £12,000, according to researcher Vera Mironava, and is often sent by relatives abroad via informal money transfer systems.
A Turkish woman who escaped from Al Hol said she knew the twins in IS and afterwards in the camp. “I’ve known them for over five years,” the woman said, speaking anonymously. “I don’t know where the other one [Salma] might be but they left together.”
The Telegraph has also seen screenshots of messages purportedly from other women in Al Hol confirming the twins are alive. They know Zahra as Umm Zubair and Salma as Umm Abdurrahman. Zahra has a four- or fiveyear-old son named Ismail, while Salma’s son was reportedly killed in fighting at Baghouz.
The UK Government is believed to have revoked the twins’ residency and imposed an exclusion order, meaning they could not re-enter the UK. A Home Office spokesman said: “We do not comment on individual cases.”
The twins told camp authorities they were Danish and they are believed to want to return there. “They want to go to Denmark because it’s likely that they will be free there, unlike in Britain,” the Turkish woman said.
Relatives in the UK indicated that they know the twins are alive. Their mother Khadra Jama said: “They have been banned from the UK.”
Speaking through a translator, she added: “The UK Government did not help me when they left. They were 16 when they left, they have been away for six years and they left from the airport and nobody helped them.”
Leaving IS supporters in insecure Syrian camps undermines efforts to prevent a resurgence of the group, said Shiraz Maher, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London.
“There is disagreement over what should be done but the idea that people [be left there to] escape is really the worst case scenario,” he said, advocating for trials in their home countries.
The SDF and the Us-led coalition against IS have called on governments to repatriate their citizens. “The best option for foreign terrorist fighters is for home countries to repatriate, prosecute and, where appropriate, incarcerate them,” said Capt Matthew Morris, a coalition spokesman.
‘The idea that people should be left [in the camps] to escape is really the worst case scenario’