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How ISIS Lured 3 London Girls - Background
Images from
recordings at Gatwick Airport show, from left, Khadiza Sultana, Shamima Begum
and Amira Abase passing through security before flying to Turkey.
AUG. 17, 2015
LONDON — The night before Khadiza Sultana
left for Syria she was dancing in her
teenage bedroom. It was a Monday during the February school vacation. Her niece
and close friend, at 13 only three years younger than Khadiza, had come for a
sleepover. The two girls wore matching pajamas and giggled as they gyrated in
unison to the beat.
Khadiza offered her niece her room that
night and shared a bed with her mother. She was a devoted daughter,
particularly since her father had died.
The scene in her bedroom, saved on the
niece’s cellphone on Feb. 16 and replayed dozens of times by Khadiza’s
relatives since, shows the girl they thought they knew: joyful, sociable, funny
and kind.
As it turned out, it was also the
carefully choreographed goodbye of a determined and exceptionally bright
teenager who had spent months methodically planning to leave her childhood home
in Bethnal Green, East London, with two schoolmates and follow the path of
another friend who had already traveled to the territory controlled by the
Islamic State.
Khadiza Sultana,
left, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum. Credit London Metroplitan Police /
Handout/European Pressphoto Agency
On Tuesday morning, Khadiza got up early
and put on the Lacoste perfume both she and her niece liked. She told her
mother that she was going to school to pick up some workbooks and spend the day
in the library. She grabbed a small day pack and promised to return by 4:30
p.m.
It was only that night that the family
realized something was wrong. When Khadiza had not come back by 5:30, her
mother asked her oldest sister, Halima Khanom, to message her, but there was no
reply. Ms. Khanom drove to the library to look for her sister, but she was not
there. She went to the school, but the staff said no student had come in that
day.
By the time she came back home, her mother
had checked Khadiza’s wardrobe and found that besides some strategically
arranged items it was empty. “That’s when I started panicking,” Ms. Khanom, 32,
said in a recent interview at the family home. Two tote bags were missing from
the house. “She must have taken her things gradually and packed a suitcase
somewhere else.”
Early the next morning her family reported
Khadiza missing. An hour later, three officers from SO15, the counterterrorism
squad of the Metropolitan Police, knocked on the door. “We believe your
daughter has traveled to Turkey with two of her friends,” one said.
Even then, Ms. Khanom said, recalling the
conversation, “Syria didn’t come into my
mind.”
The next time she saw her sister was on
the news: Grainy
security camera footage showed Khadiza and her two 15-year-old friends,
Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, calmly passing through security at Gatwick
Airport for Turkish Airlines Flight 1966 to Istanbul and later boarding a bus
to the Syrian border.
“Only when I saw that video I understood,”
Ms. Khanom said.
These images turned the three Bethnal
Green girls, as they have become known, into the face of a new, troubling
phenomenon: young women attracted to what experts like Sasha Havlicek, a
co-founder and the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue,
call a jihadi, girl-power subculture.
An estimated 4,000 Westerners have
traveled to Syria and Iraq, more than 550 of them women and girls, to join the
Islamic State, according
to a recent report by the institute, which helps manage the largest
database of female travelers to the region.
The men tend to become fighters much like
previous generations of jihadists seeking out battlefields in Bosnia,
Afghanistan and Iraq. But less is known about the Western women of the Islamic
State. Barred from combat, they support the group’s state-building efforts as
wives, mothers, recruiters and sometimes online cheerleaders of violence.
Many are single and young, typically in
their teens or early 20s (the youngest known was 13). Their profiles differ in
terms of socioeconomic background, ethnicity and nationality, but often they
are more educated and studious than their male counterparts. Security officials
now say they may present as much of a threat to the West as the men: Less
likely to be killed and more likely to lose a spouse in combat, they may try to
return home, indoctrinated and embittered.
One in four of the women in the Institute
for Strategic Dialogue’s database are already widowed. But if women are a
strategic asset for the Islamic State, they are hardly ever considered in most
aspects of Western counterterrorism.
The Bethnal Green girls, slender teenagers
with ready smiles and London accents, were praised by teachers and admired by
fellow students at Bethnal Green Academy.
Khadiza, with straight chocolate-colored
hair and thick-rimmed glasses, had been singled out as one of the most
promising students of her academic year, according to a letter her mother
received after mock exams only weeks before she left. In her bedroom, she kept
a copy of a novel that a teacher had given to her with a handwritten dedication
inside, dated January 2015: “Well done for working hard and exceeding your
target grade for English language.” In her spare time she tutored less-gifted
peers.
Her bubbly friend Amira was a star athlete
and a respected public speaker, once debating the rights of Muslim women to
wear veils. She was a regular at the local library, where she read voraciously.
(After her disappearance, when the police went to check the list of books she
had borrowed, one title, “Insurgent,” briefly rang alarm bells — until the
officer realized that it was part of a popular dystopian teenage trilogy set in
Chicago.)
“They were the girls you wanted to be
like,” said one 14-year-old from the grade below theirs.
State of Terror
Articles in this series will examine the
rise of the Islamic State and life inside the territory it has conquered.
Perhaps that is why everyone failed to
respond to the many signs that foreshadowed their dark turn. The families, who
noticed the girls’ behavior changing, attributed it to teenage whims; school
staff members, who saw their homework deteriorate, failed to inform the parents
or intervene; the police, who spoke to the girls twice about their friend who
had traveled to Syria, also never notified the parents.
They were smart, popular girls from a
world in which teenage rebellion is expressed through a radical religiosity
that questions everything around them. In this world, the counterculture is
conservative. Islam is punk rock. The head scarf is liberating. Beards are
sexy.
Ask young Muslim women in their
neighborhood what kind of guys are popular at school these days and they start
raving about “the brothers who pray.”
“Girls used to want someone who is
good-looking; nowadays, girls want Muslims who are practicing,” said Zahra Qadir,
22, who does deradicalization work for the Active Change Foundation, her
father’s charity in East London. “It’s a new thing over the last couple of
years. A lot of girls want that, even some nonpracticing girls.”
The rows of housing complexes behind Bethnal
Green’s main street are home to a deeply conservative Muslim community where
the lines between religion and extremism can be blurred, including in at least
one of the girls’ families. In this community, the everyday challenges that
girls face look very different from those of their male counterparts.
The Islamic State is making a determined
play for these girls, tailoring its siren calls to their vulnerabilities,
frustrations and dreams, and filling a void the West has so far failed to
address.
In post-9/11 austerity Britain, a time
when a deep crisis of identity and values has swept the country, fitting in can
be harder for Muslim girls than for boys. Buffeted by a growing hostility
toward Islam and deep spending cuts that have affected women and young people
in working-class communities like their own, they have come to resent the
Western freedoms and opportunities their parents sought out. They see Western
fashions sexualizing girls from an early age, while Western feminists look at
the hijab as a symbol of oppression.
Asked by their families during sporadic
phone calls and exchanges on social media platforms why they had run away, the
girls spoke of leaving behind an immoral society to search for religious virtue
and meaning. In one Twitter message, nine days before they left Britain, Amira
wrote,“I feel like I don’t belong in this era.”
Muslim girls generally outperform the boys
in school but are kept on a shorter leash at home. Many, like Khadiza, have
sisters whose marriages were arranged when they were teenagers. Ms. Khanom, now
32, was 17 when she was wed, just a year older than Khadiza. And they wear head
scarves, which identify them as Muslims in often-hostile streets.
In their world, going to Syria and joining
the so-called caliphate is a way of “taking control of your destiny,” said
Tasnime Akunjee, a lawyer who represents the families of the three girls.
“It’s about choice — the most human
thing,” Mr. Akunjee said. “These girls are smart, they are A students. When you
are smarter than everyone else, you think you can do anything.”
Since they left their homes, bits and
pieces have emerged about the three friends revealing a blend of youthful
naïveté and determination.
Khadiza’s friend Amira “fell in love with
the idea of falling in love,” a family acquaintance said. At one point, she
posted the image of a Muslim couple with a caption: “And he created you in
pairs.”
Khadiza, by contrast, told her sister in
one of the first Instagram conversations after her arrival in Syria, “I’m not
here just to get married.”
The Islamic State has proved adept at
appealing to different female profiles, using girl-to-girl
recruitment strategies, gendered imagery and iconic memes.
As Muslims, the girls would be treated
very differently from women and girls of the Yazidi minority, who are taken by
the Islamic State as slaves
and raped with the justification that they are unbelievers.
The group runs a “marriage bureau” for
single Western women. This year, the media wing of Al Khanssaa Brigade, an
all-female morality militia, published a manifesto stipulating that women
complete their formal education at age 15 and that they can be married as young
as 9, but also praising their existence in the Islamic State as “hallowed.”
Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, took a
young German woman of Iraqi descent as his third wife and put her in charge of
women’s issues in the caliphate, according to information circulating among
Islamic State-affiliated social media accounts.
Social media has allowed the group’s
followers to
directly target young women, reaching them in the privacy of their bedrooms
with propaganda that borrows from Western pop culture — images of jihadists in
the sunset and messages of empowerment. A recent post linked to an Islamic
State account paraphrased a popular L’Oréal makeup ad next to the image of a girl
in a head scarf: “COVERed GIRL. Because I’m worth it.”
“It’s a twisted version of feminism,” said
Ms. Havlicek of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who testified
about Western women under the jihadi group, also known as ISIS or
ISIL, before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on July 29.
“For the girls, joining ISIS is a
way to emancipate yourself from your parents and from the Western society that
has let you down,” Ms. Havlicek said. “For ISIS, it’s great for troop morale
because fighters want Western wives. And in the battle of ideas they can point
to these girls and say, Look, they are choosing the caliphate over the West.”
A Friend’s Departure
In January 2014, one of Khadiza’s best
friends, Sharmeena Begum, no relation to Shamima, lost her mother to cancer.
Her father soon started courting a woman who would become his second wife.
An only child, Sharmeena was deeply
shaken. Until then, she had not been very religious, friends say. “She was
barely practicing before,” according to one acquaintance of the family. After
her mother died, she started praying regularly and spending more time at the
mosque.
But there were signs she was not just
turning toward religion for comfort. Bethnal Green Academy is a state-funded
secondary school with just over 900 students, the majority of them Muslim. At
one point last year, Sharmeena had a heated exchange with a teacher, defending
the Islamic State. The teacher, also a Muslim, disagreed, and Sharmeena
“flipped out,” a witness said.
Her closest friends started changing, too.
Khadiza stopped wearing trousers and began
covering her hair after the summer vacation, at first only in school but
gradually at home as well. It was a big change for a girl who “loved” her hair
and styled the women in her family on festive occasions.
One day last fall, she asked her older
brother Shuyab Alom, a science student who sometimes helped her with homework,
what his thoughts were on Syria.
“She asked a very general question as to
what I thought about what’s happening over there,” Mr. Alom recalled. “And I
said how it was, the fact that it seems that the Syrian regime, you know, the
majority of the people oppose the regime.”
Around the same time, other friends at
school noticed the girls’ lunchtime conversations changing. One friend, whose
passport has since been seized because it was feared that she, too, might go to
Syria (she denies this), reported a “noticeable” change in attitude.
When Sharmeena’s father remarried in the
fall, Khadiza accompanied her to the wedding. Soon after, on Saturday, Dec. 6,
Sharmeena disappeared.
“She was vulnerable; she had a trauma,”
said Mr. Akunjee, the lawyer, who does not represent Sharmeena’s family but is
familiar with her case. “She didn’t get a body piercing or a drug-dealer
boyfriend. She went to ISIS.”
Khadiza did not tell her family that
Sharmeena had run away. When a school staff member called to inform the family
that Khadiza’s friend had “gone missing,” the official did not specify that she
was believed to have traveled to Syria, Ms. Khanom, Khadiza’s sister, recalled.
Her mother asked Khadiza regularly whether
she had received news of her friend. “And she’d be like, ‘Well, I don’t know, I
don’t know,’” Ms. Khanom said. “And I thought that was weird.”
Sharmeena’s father, Mohammad Uddin, said
he had been surprised that the other girls had not left with his daughter. He
told The Daily Mail he had urged the police and the school to keep a close eye on
them, though the police say the formal statement Mr. Uddin gave to them on Feb.
10 — a week before the three girls left — held no such warning.
At the time, one officer was charged with
getting in touch with the girls, but they were “uncooperative” and did not
return his calls and messages. He asked the school to set up meetings with them
and four other friends. Two meetings took place, one in the presence of the
deputy principal and one with a teacher. But even then, Ms. Khanom said,
neither the school nor the police told the families exactly what was going on.
Asked about failing to spot the signs of
the girls’ radicalization, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police maintained
that there had been no indication in the interviews that any of them “were in
any way vulnerable or indeed radicalized.”
“There was no indication that any of the
girls were at risk of traveling to Syria,” the spokesman said.
On Feb. 5, officers gave letters to the
girls, seeking their parents’ permission to take formal statements from them
about Sharmeena’s disappearance. But the girls never passed the letters on.
Khadiza’s was discovered by her sister hidden in textbooks in her bedroom after
they had left.
Ms. Khanom was furious. “I saw the guy who
gave her the letter. He said the 15-year-olds were giving him a runaround. And
I’m like: ‘You’re supposed to be someone who’s trained in counterterrorism, you
know. We don’t understand about 15-year-olds giving you a runaround. How does
that work?’ ”
Eventually the police issued an apology.
The commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, said he was sorry that the letters had
never reached the parents. A spokesman added, “With the benefit of hindsight,
we acknowledge that the letters could have been delivered direct to the
parents.”
As the police and the school were keeping
Sharmeena’s suspected travel to Syria quiet, Khadiza and her friends began
planning to follow in her footsteps.
Girls’ Pact and Missed Signs
In messy handwriting on a page ripped out
of a calendar, the girls made a detailed checklist for their trip: bras, a
cellphone, an epilator, makeup and warm clothes, among other things. Next to
each item, they noted cost, including just over 1,000 pounds for tickets to
Turkey.
Discovered at the bottom of one of the
girls’ closets after their departure, the list also appears to contain the
handwriting of a fourth girl who had apparently planned to travel but dropped
out when her father had a stroke. Since then, a judge has confiscated the
passports belonging to her, three other students at Bethnal Green Academy and a
fifth girl from the neighborhood.
Like other teenagers, the girls were
sensitive to peer pressure. They were what Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the
International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence,
called a textbook “cluster,” making the multiple oversights by the school and
the police even more surprising.
If one member of a group of friends has
gone to Syria, Mr. Maher said, that is a far more reliable predictor of the
friends being at risk of going than variables like class or ethnicity. In
clusters like the Bethnal Green group, doubts are drowned out and views quickly
reinforced.
Mr. Akunjee, the lawyer, said, “From
December it is pretty clear that there is a pact between the girls.”
Planning their trip appears to have
occupied much of their time. Their homework, diligently completed before
Sharmeena’s departure, came back incomplete in the weeks after.
“I’m amazed that the teachers and police
missed that,” said Mr. Akunjee, who reviewed the homework. “These are bright
girls. Well above average clever. This was a year with exams coming up.
Shouldn’t the school have informed the parents?” It is a question the police
are asking the school, too.
Khadiza and her friend Amira exchanged
many messages on social media. In one post, Amira described the two of them as
“twins.” In a tweet dated Dec. 20, she posted a hadith on being in a group of
three friends: “If you are three (in number), then let not two engage in
private, excluding the third.”
Was Amira worried about her two friends
speaking without her and questioning their pact to go to Syria? She was perhaps
the most active of the three friends on social media, providing glimpses of the
gradual radicalization the group underwent.
In her posts, under the name Umm Uthman
Britaniya, typical teenage commentary about fashion, school and her favorite
soccer club (Chelsea) increasingly mixed with posts inquiring about how to
learn Arabic quickly and what behavior is or is not Islamic.
“Are nose piercings Haram or not?” one of
her posts asked on Dec. 30, meaning were they forbidden under Islam.
“Connnfuuuusseedddd.” Two weeks later she wrote, “The Prophet (PBUH) cursed
those who pluck their eyebrows.”
But far from portraying an increasingly
submissive girl, Amira’s Twitter messages featured punchy fist emoticons and
empowered language: “Our abaya game” she wrote under a photo of four girls
proudly clad in Muslim garb, is “strong.” In January, she wrote about rape:
“Hearing these stories of sisters being raped makes me so close to being
allergic to men, Wallah.”
Around the same time, Khadiza’s family
noticed that she became “more quiet.”
“She spent a lot of time on her iPod,” her
sister, Ms. Khanom, recalled. The iPod had been the subject of a dispute between
Khadiza and her mother a year earlier. Khadiza had asked for one, but her
mother had said no. It took Ms. Khanom to lobby on her behalf.
On her iPod she received a steady stream
of images depicting atrocities against Muslim children, from Syria to Myanmar.
Her friend Amira posted and reposted several. One of her posts, a photo of a
3-year-old boy, was captioned, “This always gets to me.”
“Almost every day, I go on Facebook and
I’m shown a horrible post somewhere,” Khadiza’s brother, Mr. Alom, said. “Online
you have whole pages and groups and accounts dedicated to these sort of things,
where they post pictures, they post videos.”
A lot of young Muslims, he said, feel that
“Islamophobia is a very prevalent thing.”
“And then a group comes to them and says,
like: ‘This is where you come,’ this is where they will be complete. ‘It’s a
home for you.’ That appeals to them.”
He continued: “Yeah, that’s the main
thing, because a lot of people feel that they are out of place to where they
are.”
Bethnal Green is only one subway stop from
the moneyed towers of the City of London and stretches into the capital’s
trendy start-up district. Bearded hipsters are a common sight among the
bustling market stalls selling everything from saris to spices.
But four in 10 residents, including
Khadiza’s and Shamima’s families, have roots in Bangladesh. (Amira was born in
Ethiopia and spent her early childhood in Germany before moving here when she
was 11.) A literalist interpretation of Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia has
become more mainstream and has combined with a widely shared sense that Muslims
across the world suffer injustices in which the West is complicit.
After the girls vanished, it emerged that
Amira’s father, Hussen Abase, had been filmed attending an Islamist rally in 2012
organized by a notorious hate preacher, Anjem Choudary, and also attended by
Michael Adebowale, one of the two men who hacked a British soldier to death on
a London Street in 2013. In
the video Mr. Abase, who in March appeared on British
television sobbing and cradling his daughter’s teddy bear and begging her
to come home, can be seen chanting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) as an American
flag is burned nearby.
He occasionally took Amira to marches,
too. Among the people she followed on
Twitter was Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, who has close links to Mr. Choudary.
Both men were charged this month with supporting the Islamic State. Mr. Abase
did not respond to an interview request.
“Some parents create the atmosphere for
their children,” said Haras Rafiq, the managing director of the Quilliam
Foundation, an anti-extremism research center.
As Amira became more vocal on Twitter,
Khadiza became more argumentative at home, on occasion scolding older siblings
for acting “un-Islamic” or pressing her niece to disobey her mother.
The last time Ms. Khanom saw her sister
was five days before she left. Her cousin Fahmida Abdul Aziz had come over,
too. “We were fighting over a bag of Bombay mix,” Ms. Khanom said, referring to
a traditional Indian snack. “She loves that. I guess she gets that off my dad,
because my dad used to love it, too.”
They were sitting on the living room sofa.
“She was in her PJs, you know like a T-shirt and a pajama bottom, and she just
literally came, sat herself between the two of us and put her arms around us,”
the cousin, Ms. Aziz said, smiling at the memory. “You know, just looked at me
and just gave me a cuddle.”
The next day, Khadiza asked that her niece
come to stay, but Ms. Khanom, the niece’s mother, said no because it was a
school night. Uncharacteristically, she said, Khadiza texted her niece, urging
her to disobey: “Just jump on the bus and come.”
That same week, Amira implored her Twitter
followers in capital letters: “PRAY ALLAH GRANTS ME THE HIGHEST RANKS IN
JANNAH, MAKES ME SINCERE IN MY WORSHIP AND KEEPS ME STEADFAST.” She posted a
photo of three girls in black head scarves and abayas in a local park with
their backs to the camera, presumably her and her two friends. “Sisters,” the
caption reads.
Call Home, Girls
On Feb. 15, just two days before the three
girls left, Shamima sent a Twitter message to a prominent Islamic State recruiter from Glasgow, Aqsa Mahmood.
The youngest of the three, Shamima is also the most elusive. Little is known
about her apart from the fact that she loved to watch “Keeping Up With the
Kardashians” and traveled to Turkey on the passport of her 17-year-old sister,
Aklima.
Ms. Mahmood, who goes by the name Umm
Layth (meaning Mother of the Lion) and provides advice on social media to
would-be female migrants, has denied recruiting the girls. But her parents’
lawyer expressed surprise that the security services, believed to be monitoring
Ms. Mahmood’s social media accounts, had not reacted to Shamima’s approach.
Khadiza’s family members say it is
unlikely that the girls could have raised an estimated 3,000 pounds, or about
$4,700, to cover the cost of their trip on their own. The plane tickets alone,
police confirmed, cost more than 1,000 pounds and were paid for in cash at a
local travel agency.
Unlike the friend who left earlier,
Sharmeena, who had an inheritance from her mother, the three girls had no known
source of money, raising questions about whether they were recruited and had
outside help.
A suggestion by the counterterrorism chief
of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, that the girls might have stolen from
the families did not go down well: “I felt like punching them; that was a
blatant lie,” Khadiza’s sister said.
“Khadiza took some of her jewelry but nothing
expensive,” Ms. Khanom said. She left behind the most precious item she owned,
a Swarovski necklace she had gotten for her most recent birthday. She did not
touch the money in her sister’s bag in the hallway that morning and took
nothing from her mother’s kitty.
“Nothing was missing,” Ms. Khanom said.
A street in
Bethnal Green, home to a deeply conservative Muslim community. Credit Andrew
Testa for The New York Times
The police are still trying to establish
whether the girls had help online or from a local recruiter. The trouble,
investigators say, is that traveling to a conflict zone is not a crime in
Britain, nor is encouraging or facilitating travel to a conflict zone, unless a
terrorist purpose can be proven.
“If a local facilitator is identified, a
likelier ground for prosecution might be child abduction,” a senior officer
said.
Teenage girls often are infatuated with
outlaw boys who make their own rules and don't back down from anyone. Girls
like this see bigger...
Maybe if their families and community had
spoken frankly about ISIS's atrocities this would not have happened. Maybe if
their
The families’ lawyer is convinced the
girls tapped into a shadowy recruitment network embedded in and protected by
the community in East London and were then handled “point to point.”
In shaky footage, apparently filmed on a
hidden camera near the Syrian border and broadcast on A Haber, a Turkish
television network, the girls are seen alongside a man in a maroon hooded
sweatshirt. Another man, bearded and bespectacled, takes bags out of the trunk
of one car and helps load them into another.
“This car,” he seems to tell them in
heavily accented English, then apparently directs them to take passports
allowing them into Syria.
The girls, who arrived in Turkey on a
Tuesday night and were reported missing by early Wednesday, waited 18 hours at
a bus station in an Istanbul suburb and crossed into Syria only on Friday.
Police in both Britain and Turkey have faced accusations of reacting too
slowly.
Eventually the Turkish police arrested a
man on allegations that he had helped the teenagers cross the border. The
Turkish news agency Dogan said the man had helped several other Britons cross
into Syria for a fee between $800 and $1,500.
“This is not a package holiday,” Mr.
Akunjee said. “It is a complicated journey.”
He knows this firsthand. One of the first
things he did after the families hired him was to travel with relatives of all
three girls to Turkey and make a public appeal to the girls to get in touch.
The campaign, publicized with the hashtag #callhomegirls,
was widely covered in the British press.
“Even I needed fixers to help me set it
all up,” said Mr. Akunjee, who knows Turkey well. (He recently negotiated the
release of a British girl held hostage by the Nusra Front.) “There is no way
the girls did this on their own.”
Khadiza’s sister, Ms. Khanom, was among
those who traveled to Turkey. “It was like we were retracing their steps,” she
said. When the appeal went out, the families learned that 53 other women and
girls were believed to have left Britain for Syria.
“Fifty-three,” Ms. Khanom said. “Where are
all these girls?”
First Contact
The morning after the families returned to
London, a message popped up on Ms. Khanom’s Instagram account. Her request to
follow her sister, blocked since Khadiza had left for Syria, had been accepted.
Ms. Khanom said she sent Khadiza a private
message, asking to let her know that she was safe. Her sister replied and later
messaged again, asking about their mother.
“She is on her prayer mat asking Allah to
help her find you,” Ms. Khanom wrote.
“I’ll call soon okay,” Khadiza replied.
“She has not been sleeping or eating since
you left,” her sister wrote.
“Tell her to eat.”
“She is asking do you not want to see
her?”
“Of course I do.”
But Khadiza also seemed suspicious of the
families’ trip to Turkey, making Ms. Khanom wonder if it was really her sister
messaging her. “It’s just the way of asking questions about what happened in
Turkey: Why did I go? Those kind of things. It just felt like, why would she be
asking me these questions, you know.”
At one point, Ms. Khanom tested her: “Who
is Big Toe?” she asked. Khadiza sent back a “lol” and replied: “Our cousin.”
For a moment it was as if they were back
in the same city. “I kind of forgot she’s not here,” Ms. Khanom said.
She asked her sister to keep in touch.
Khadiza promised she would, but insisted that it would always be her initiating
contact. “I don’t think she has full freedom,” Ms. Khanom said.
The next day, Khadiza messaged again.
“I asked her, ‘Are you married?’ She goes:
‘You know me too well. I’m not here just to get married to someone,’” Ms.
Khanom recalled. Khadiza said she was “considering.”
“What do you mean by considering?” Ms.
Khanom recalled asking.
“Looking into getting married,” the reply
came.
“When?”
“Soon.”
From these early conversations, and
descriptions of the food they were eating — fried chicken, French fries and
pizza — the families and authorities concluded that the three girls were in Raqqa,
the de facto capital of the Islamic State, housed in one of several hostels
for single women. Khadiza said she was living in a nice house “with
chandeliers.”
Zahra Qadir of
the Active Change Foundation, an East London charity. "Nowadays girls want
Muslims who are practicing,” she said. “It’s a new thing over the last couple
of years." Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Ms. Khanom pleaded with her to come home,
telling her that the police had assured the families that the girls would not
face prosecution.
Khadiza did not believe it. “They’re
lying,” she told her sister.
No Way Back?
At Bethnal Green Academy, a school with a
fine academic record, now notorious for having four of its students join the
Islamic State, the departure of the girls is gingerly referred to as “the
incident.”
In the week after they ran away, the
principal, Mark Keary, called an assembly. Students were upset, and some
teachers cried. But it quickly became clear that this was not a place where the
issue of the girls’ departure would be openly discussed. As Mr. Keary put it
that same week, it was “business as usual” for the school.
“He brushed over it,” said one girl who
had attended the assembly. Teachers have been threatened with dismissal if they
speak out publicly, people in the school said. Mr. Keary declined to comment.
Two weeks after the girls disappeared, the
phone rang at the help line of the Active Change Foundation, the organization
working on deradicalization and prevention.
It was the father of a student at Bethnal
Green Academy. His daughter had overheard a group of girls at lunchtime talking
about going to Syria. He said it appeared they were in contact with the girls
already there and were planning to join them over the Easter holiday. Hanif
Qadir, who runs the charity, informed the local council. On March 20, a judge
took away the girls’ passports.
It was an early indication that Khadiza,
Amira and Shamima seemed to be settling into life in Raqqa.
Since then, all three girls have married,
their families’ lawyer confirmed. They were given a choice among a number of
Western men. One chose a Canadian, another a European. Amira married Abdullah
Elmir, a former butcher from Australia, who has
appeared in several ISIS recruitment videos and has been named “ginger
jihadi” for his reddish hair.
All three have moved out of the hostel and
live with their husbands. They have sporadic contact with home. The
conversations give the impression that the girls have few regrets about leaving
their lives in London. But they also hint at hardships like frequent
electricity cuts and shortages of Western goods. One recent chat came to an
abrupt end because airstrikes were starting.
Khadiza told her sister that she still
wanted to become a doctor. There is a medical school in Raqqa, she said. The
logo for the Islamic State Health Service mimics the blue-and-white logo of
Britain’s treasured National Health Service.
In a recent online exchange on Twitter and
Kik with a British tabloid reporter posing as a schoolgirl interested in going
to Syria, Amira gave instructions that appeared to track her own experience:
She advised the “girl” to tell her parents that she was going for review
classes to escape the house, then fly to Turkey and take a bus to Gaziantep,
where she could be smuggled across the border. She recommended a travel agent
in Brick Lane, a short walk from Bethnal Green Academy, which would accept cash
and ask no questions, and suggested taking along bras because “they have the
worst bras here.”
She also asked if the would-be recruit
would consider becoming a second wife to a Lebanese-Australian, a description
fitting her own husband, and appeared to mock a minute of silence for the
mostly British victims of a recent shooting in Tunisia for which the Islamic
State claimed responsibility, with “Looooool,” shorthand for “laugh out loud.”
It is getting harder to know if it is the
girls who are communicating. Increasingly their conversations are interspersed
with stock propagandistic phrases.
“Have they adapted that language, or is
there someone standing next to them?” Mr. Akunjee asked. “We don’t know. But
they’re not the people their families recognize. They’re not them anymore. And
how could they be?”
Standing in her sister’s bedroom one
recent afternoon Ms. Khanom recalled the girl who had watched “The Princess
Diaries” at least four times and loved Zumba dancing in the living room.
Her room is unchanged; perfumes and
teenage accessories remain on a small chest. Her exam schedule is still taped
to the inside of her closet door: math, statistics, history, English. A
checkered scarf, which Khadiza had dropped on the morning of her departure in
the hallway outside, is neatly folded on a shelf. It still carries her scent.
There are frames filled with photos of her
sisters and her nephew, as well as her niece, who has taken her departure
particularly badly.
“She’s very affected by it, she misses her
terribly, Khalummy — that’s what she calls her, Khalummy,” Ms. Khanom said,
referring to a Bengali term of endearment for aunt. “You know, sometimes she
shows anger, sometimes she thinks that, you know, she could have stopped her
that morning. She saw her get ready.”
“I don’t want to say they’re memories because. ...,” Ms Khanom said, her eyes traveling across her sister’s things. “They’re memories, but not as if, like. ...,” her voice trailing off again. “I hope and I feel she’s going to come back and things are going to go back to normal."