Families vow to bring home nine medical students who went to treat jihadis in Syria
NINE British medical students have travelled secretly to Syria to help treat jihadi fighters in hospitals controlled by Islamic State, it emerged yesterday.
The group of five men and four women, all in their late teens and early 20s, fled medical school in Sudan and travelled to Istanbul before crossing the Turkish border.
One woman, a surgeon’s daughter, sent a smiling selfie to her sister before entering Syria. Their desperate parents believe they have been ‘brainwashed’ by Islamic fanatics and have now travelled to the region in a bid to convince their children to return home.
The students are from the Sudanese community, but were born and raised in England.
‘They have been cheated, brainwashed. That is what I, and their relatives, think,’ Turkish opposition politician Mehmet Ali Ediboglu said after meeting the families.
‘We all assume that they are in Tel Abyad now, which is under IS control. The conflict out there is fierce, so medical help must be needed.’
He insisted that the students wanted to volunteer in hospitals, adding: ‘Let’s not forget about the fact that they are doctors; they were there to help, not to fight.’
It is believed the students had been enrolled in medical school in Khartoum. Last year, a British medical student who attended the same Khartoum medical school was arrested on suspicion of plotting with Islamic State.
Tarik Hassane, 21, known to friends as ‘The Surgeon’, allegedly posted on Twitter ‘I smell war’ hours before his arrest. He was Tasered by police who stormed a relative’s flat where he was sleeping after flying into the country.
Three of the students had graduated and the others were still studying, it is thought. They were joined by two medics from the US and Canada, also of Sudanese origin. About a dozen classmates are believed to have flown from the Sudanese capital to Istanbul on March 12, then taken a bus to the border the next day. They are thought to have kept the plans secret from their families.
They were named as Lena Mamoun Abdelgadir, Nada Sami Kader, Rowan Kamal Zine El Abidine, Tasneem Suleyman Huseyin, Ismail Hamdoun, Tamer Ahmed Ebu Sebah, Mohammed Osama Badri Mohammed, Hisham Mohammed Fadlallah and Sami Ahmed Kadir.
Their parents are now living near the wire fences of the Turkish-Syrian border desperately trying to get their children back. One of the runaway girls, Lena Mamoun Abdelgadir, 19, of King’s Lynn in Norfolk, sent a selfie to her sister just before crossing the border. Her father Mamoun Abdelgadir is a surgeon at King’s Lynn’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
She sent the picture over social networking site WhatsApp, saying: ‘Don’t worry about us, we’ve reached Turkey and are on our way to volunteer helping wounded Syrian people.’
She sent it just before crossing the border and, within hours, her father boarded a plane to Turkey where he has been ever since.
‘We have decided not to return home unless we go with them,’ Mr Abdelgadir told Spanish news agency Efe. ‘We sent our children to study [in Sudan] so that they would be surrounded by their culture. But their decision to go to Syria has been a shock for all of us.’
There was no answer at the smart family home in a village outside King’s Lynn last
‘A shock for all of us’
night, but a neighbour said that the family were ‘doing what they had to do’.
Ahmed Babikir, students’ dean at Khartoum’s private University of Medical Sciences, told AFP that five students were missing after travelling to Turkey. He said that they were ‘top students’ who had been studying medicine and pharmacology, with one expected to qualify as ‘the youngest surgeon’ in Sudan.
Hamdoun’s Facebook page shows pictures of hunting trips in Sudan in which his friends pose with guns and heads of dead rabbits.
The Home Office said the students would not automatically face prosecution under anti-terror laws if they tried to return to the UK, as long as they could prove that they had not been fighting.
Mr Ediboglu said he thought the students were volunteers through a charity called IHH, which he called a ‘voluntary medical group’.