What happened to the two teenage girls who left with Shamima Begum to join the Islamic State?

ISIS poster girl Shamima Begum left her east London school seven years ago this week for the half term break.

Along with two friends, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultan they left their families, headed to Gatwick Airport and travelled through Turkey to join Islamic State in Syria.

None of them would return to the UK.

Shamima, 15, and her year 10 friends from Bethnal Green Academy were described as straight-A students before they decided to join the caliphate.

The trio hit headlines around the world when CCTV images of them walking through metal detectors at the London airport were released in a desperate bid to stop them arriving at their destination.

The teenagers were traveling alone, with Shamima wearing a leopard print scarf, 15-year- old Amira in a luminous yellow hoody and 16-year-old Kadiza with a grey checked scarf and jumper.

The scarves were seen again in CCTV of the girls at a bus terminal in Istanbul turkey, as they carried their heavy bags through the snow and waited for to board the public transport onward.

The police appeal was already too late, the girls had already made it across the border.

In the weeks leading up to their disappearance, another girl from their school had made the same journey to Syria to join what they Shamima says she was told “was just an Islamic community”.

Police had been to their school and had wanted to interview the girls about what they knew, but crucially letters asking their parents permission to speak to them never reached home.

Instead of the letters being posted or emailed home, they were given to the girls who simply hid them between pages of a text book in their bags.

Now in Syria, the teenagers all married Islamic fighters although the roles they played in the caliphate remain uncertain.

Shamima claims she was simply a housewife, while intelligence sources have said she was involved with stitching explosives into suicide vests.

Kadiza Sultana was the oldest of the three girls. She had married an American ISIS fighter but in phone calls to her sister in the UK, filmed for ITV News, she said she wanted to return to the UK but was “scared”.

Speaking straight after the phone call her sister Halima said: “She sounds very terrified.

“She did get very emotional there as well. It feels…I feel really helpless. What can I do? It’s really hard. I don’t think she’s ever made a choice by herself.

“That was the first one and a very big one. I just look forward to the next call and that’s what keeps me going.”

Kadiza is believed to have died in a Russian airstrike a few weeks later in May 2016, but that has never been independently confirmed.

Her family’s lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee, told BBC Newsnight they heard a report of her death in Raqqa.

He said: “The problem with that was the risk factors around leaving are quite terminal also, in that if ISIS were able to detect and capture you then their punishment is quite brutal for trying to leave.

“In the week where she was thinking of these issues a young Austrian girl had been caught trying to leave ISIS territory and was by all reports beaten to death publicly, so given that that was circulated in the region as well as outside – I think Kadiza took that as a bad omen and decided not to take the risk.”

Mr Akunjee added: “I think she found out pretty quickly that the propaganda doesn’t match up with the reality.”

Speaking years later Shamima Begum spoke about losing her friend.

She said: “Her house was bombed. Underground, there was secret stuff going on and a spy had figured out that something was going on and other people got killed as well.

“At first I was in denial. I thought if we died we’d die together.”

Amira Abase had also married an ISIS fighter, Abdullah Elmir an 18-year-old Australian, who was nicknamed the Ginger Jihadi, because of his ginger hair.

He was killed in a drone strike in December 2015.

Amira had been communicating with her mum Fetia Hussen back in the UK via social media but the messages suddenly stopped and her mum now believes her daughter is dead too.

Although Shamima Begum has claimed Amira is still alive.

Shamima herself has since been stripped of her British citizenship in 2019 and become a mother to three children, who have all died during her time out of the UK.

She is now selling food parcels she has been given in a detention camp by aid agencies to make enough money for western clothes and hair dye.

She has claimed she wants to stand out from the other women at a detention camp who are still supporting the terrorist organisation, by changing her look.

Ms Begum, who has been living in Al-Roj Camp in northeast since her UK citizenship was stripped in 2019, has spoken to ITV News as part of a new podcast series, presented by Global Security Editor Rohit Kachroo.

Shamima Begum: The Blame Game podcast looks at whether the authorities made errors that enabled the 22-year-old to travel to Syria with her friends.

he has made messages which have been smuggled out of the camp and sent to a filmmaker.

In them she makes clear her despair at being left ‘stateless’ and describes how she has tried to recover from the trauma of losing three babies.

She said: “I’ve moved on from that part of my life, it doesn’t make me feel sad anymore.”

She remains inside the camp.

Source: Mirror