ISIS CAMP GIRL: I’M FROM UK
Orphaned Briton and her helpless siblings are among 950 to escape with terrorist suspects into desert as Turkey’s brutal border war escalates
The little girl speaks slowly and deliberately as she describes an event of unimaginable horror.
‘We were going to pack our stuff and get out... the airplane came and bombed,’ she says in fluent english with just a hint of a London accent as she recounts Islamic State’s last stand this spring.
With her head tilted to one side, a red headscarf covering her hair, she talks of the tents her family lived in, the scarcity of food, then a bomb falling and the instructions from her father to grab their ‘important stuff’ and run.
exhibiting a maturity beyond her years, only once does emotion threaten to overcome the little girl in the black spotted dress with red flowers – the moment part of her family was destroyed during the Battle of Baghouz.
‘So then my mum died, my littlest brother, my little brother and my sister. Then after that, it was all getting on fire. We had to walk out. There was a little house and a big dusty mountain and behind it everybody was dead.’
At just ten, Amira has seen death and destruction on an unimaginable scale.
It’s been eight months since the horrors of Baghouz. Until yesterday, Amira and her two siblings, sister heba, eight, and brother hamza, six, were among 24 orphans largely fending for themselves in part of a camp near the town of Ain Issa. Of the 13,000 women and children there, around 1,000 are linked to IS.
hours after Amira told her story, the area around the camp was attacked and its jihadi brides and youngsters overran the guards and escaped. Along with the rest of the occupants, the children disappeared. But last night reports suggested they were safe.
The current conflict in the region began on Wednesday when Donald Trump pulled US troops from the border, allowing Turkish soldiers to march in under the pretence of fighting ‘terrorism’ by killing Syrian-Kurds.
Amira, heba and hamza are believed to be from the UK. She has a grandmother, a woman Amira remembers only as ‘Grandmum’ – who may very well have seen her granddaughter on screen yesterday. But any hopes of a reunion will have been swiftly shattered by the breakout.
Jelal Ayaf, co-chairman of the camp, north of the former de-facto IS capital of Raqqa, said it came under attack from IS sleeper cells, allowing 950 foreign jihadi wives and their children to escape.
Kurdish leaders said the escape came with the help of ‘mercenaries’, a reference to Syrian rebel fighters allied with Turkey. Turkish warplanes are said to have dropped a bomb nearby, causing chaos.
Mustafa Bali, spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) a Kurdish-led militia that helped defeat IS, said: ‘IS members attacked the camp guard and opened the doors to flee.
‘Almost all suspected IS militants fled the camp.’
The camp is almost empty, with only a few inmates said to remain along with masked foreigners circling the camp on motorbikes.
British female IS members are among those thought to be on the run, including alleged recruiter Tooba Gondal, 25, from Walthamstow, east London, who reportedly lured Bethnal Green schoolgirl Shamima Begum and two classmates to Syria with promises of marriage to IS fighters.
Gondal was thought to have been in the camp with her two children. ITV reported last night that she was among those who fled.
‘I am free’ and ‘in the street’, she texted her family in London. She said Kurdish forces ‘ran away’ and pleaded with her family in the UK to find help, adding: ‘Children are very tired. There is no UN.’
Zara Iqbal – who has pleaded to return to Britain after travelling to the warzone with her sister, Reema, and their children from east London – was also one of those known to have been in the camp.
But these heartbreaking images of Amira prove that some of the camp’s occupants are so young they can only be the innocent victims of someone else’s war.
Amira should be in primary school with her friends. Instead, she can only speak english when alone with her siblings. In the presence of others they speak Arabic.
Amira recalls enough of her life in Britain to tell a BBC film crew that she is from London. Writing phonetically, she slowly scribbles on a scrap of paper: ‘LaDN, uKeh.’
She remembers going to the park, a funfair, a restaurant – and her ‘Grandmum’s house’.
But her horrifying memories are clearer. The children are thought to have been taken from London to the so-called caliphate by their parents – supporters of IS – five years ago and have spent most of their lives under its brutal regime.
‘When we were in Baghouz we were living in tents and there wasn’t much food. In the morning, they were bombing,’ Amira said. ‘They bombed one tent.
‘So then our dad told us to come out, to quickly take our important stuff and come out before our tent catches fire. We took our stuff and we were walking. They were hitting so much, we had to run.’
She told BBC reporter Quentin Sommerville how her older brother went to find their father, only for her mother, little brother and sister to be killed in an explosion. Describing how her brother returned, she said: ‘he was running up because he knows my mum was dead there. But everything he could find they were hitting with bombs, and there were guns.
‘he just ran in and went down, and then when he was running the little house broke and everything went on fire so he died.’
The children’s father is also thought to have been killed.
In the footage, heba shows a scar stretching the length of her abdomen, a sign of other horrific experiences that remain untold.
however, Amira lives in hope, describing how she wants one day to have a garden filled with watermelon, strawberries, cherries, blueberries and apples.
The footage has renewed debate about whether Britain should take in children taken to or born in IS territory by their British parents.
It was estimated this year that at least 30 British children were being held with their mothers in dangerous, overcrowded camps in northern Syria. The Government is under pressure from Syrian authorities and Donald Trump to bring them home. But ministers say it is too dangerous to go in and rescue them.
Last night, a Government spokesman said: ‘There may be British children in “internally displaced persons” camps in Syria who, because of their age, are innocent victims of the conflict.
‘We look at all evidence to determine someone’s nationality and will examine every single case where we are asked for consular assistance, but this process is far from straightforward.’
home Secretary Priti Patel said
‘Innocent victims of the conflict’
last month: ‘I am simply not willing to allow anybody who has been an active supporter or campaigner of IS in this country.’
A Home Office spokesman said she had not changed her mind, adding that children were ‘victims first and foremost’. But he said: ‘But they may also pose a threat and these cases would need to be dealt with carefully.’
Since last year, Britain has revoked the citizenship of IS fighters and supporters, stripping passports from several in Syrian jails and camps.
In the case of Amira and her siblings, the emptying of Ain Issa camp makes the issue of repatriation redundant for now.
There is no consular assistance in Syria, so unless the children make it to the border with Turkey or Iraq, they will have to wait a long time. Ain Issa, 20 miles south of Turkey, had one of the largest US-led coalition bases in north-eastern Syria. Now, in the wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw his troops from the area, Kurdish forces who fought with the US against IS have warned that they may not be able to maintain detention camps holding thousands of militants while they try to hold off the Turks. As to the consequences, the dangers were spelled out earlier this year by de-facto SDF foreign minister Abdul Karim Omar. He told me that if the UK did not take back its fighters and their wives Britain faced seeing them all being freed. Speaking in Qamishli – which is now under attack by Turkey – he predicted IS and Turkey would go on the offensive, adding: ‘There will be huge war and this will create huge immigration. Those fighters and their wives will come back to Britain and be terrorists in the UK. Not only the fighters but also the children. They will be ticking time bombs.’ As for Amira and her siblings, what horrors lie ahead? Last night there were reports that the three children were safe. One can only hope they are – and that somewhere in Britain, a grandmother now knows three of her grandchildren may still be alive.