Mystery over fate of Scots student who ran away and joined Isis
SHE was one of the first British women to join Isis and is believed to have recruited Shamima Begum and her two school friends, collectively known as the Bethnal Green trio.
Today, however, the whereabouts of Glaswegian Aqsa Mahmood are unknown. The former medical student reportedly became a prominent figure in the terror group’s all-female Sharia police unit, the al-Khansaa Brigade.
She grew up in a comfortable home and was privately educated, and was a promising radiography student at Glasgow Caledonian University when she ran off to Syria in November 2013, at the age of 19.
Pictured holding a gun soon afterwards, she became a poster girl for Islamic State’s campaign to recruit disaffected young women to their caliphate and, on the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, she declared she would return home to Scotland only to raise the black flag of IS.
Mahmood would go on to urge British
‘Rather see her behind bars than dead on a battlefield’
Muslims to carry out ‘another Woolwich’, referring to the murder and attempted beheading of Fusilier Lee Rigby, and describe the 2015 attack on a Tunisian beach resort, in which 38 people were killed, as a ‘day that will go down in history’.
As a recruiter of Jihadi brides, she enjoyed extraordinary success and the only message ever sent from Shamima Begum’s Twitter account was to Mahmood in Syria. Just a few days before Begum left London with her friends, she wrote: ‘Follow me so I can DM you back.’
The UN added Mahmood in 2015 to its Al-Qaeda sanctions list and the US Department of the Treasury classed her as a ‘specially designated global terrorist’.
Her parents, Muzaffar and Khalida, have condemned her actions and say she has become ‘the living dead’, adding they would rather see her ‘behind bars in Scotland than dead on a battlefield’.