Bethnal Green schoolgirl turned jihadi bride Shamima Begum has sparked public debate once again as foreign secretary David Lammy has insisted that she will never be allowed back on UK soil.
Less is known about Ms Begum’s two school pals, who accompanied her on the dangerous journey from London to Syria in February 2015. Kadiza Sultana, then 16, and Amira Abase, then 15. The trio were friends at Bethnal Green Academy, where they were studious, straight-A students. Then, their lives took a drastically different course.
Ms Begum was just 15 years old when she left her family to join Islamic State ISIS, setting out on a path that would ultimately see her stripped of her British citizenship and living in a detention camp in Syria. Now 25 and still determined to come home, Mr Lammy’s words will likely be another blow.
As Begum’s story makes headlines once again, the Mirror takes a look at what happened next to her classmates turned fellow ISIS brides, Sultana and Abase.
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 from arriving at their destination. They were traveling alone, with Begum wearing a leopard print scarf, Abase in a luminous yellow hoodie, and Sultana in 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 to board public transport. But the police appeal was already too late – the girls had made it across the border to marry Islamic fighters in Syria.
The roles they played in the caliphate remain uncertain. Begum claims she was simply a housewife, while intelligence sources said she was involved with stitching explosives into suicide vests.
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. 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.”
Sultana 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. Mr Akunjee explained: “I think she found out pretty quickly that the propaganda doesn’t match up with the reality.”
He also 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.”
Speaking years later, 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.”
Abase married 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. Abase 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.
However, Begum has previously claimed Abase is still alive. Begum married IS member Dutch national Yago Riedijk, 27, when she was 15 and had three children with him, who all later died. She was stripped of her British citizenship in 2019 and lost her appeal to get it back in 2023. She reportedly now sells food parcels she has been given in a detention camp by aid agencies to make enough money for Western clothes and hair dye.
Last year, Begum attempted to overturn the government’s 2019 decision to strip her citizenship on national security grounds. However, in August, judges ruled that she would not be allowed to challenge the removal at the Supreme Court as the grounds of her case “do not raise an arguable point of law.”
At the time, her solicitor Daniel Furner said: “We are not going to stop fighting until she does get justice and until she is safely back home”
The question of whether Begum will be allowed back to London has been debated once more in the aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime late last year. Now, David Lammy has vowed that Begum will never be allowed to return home to the UK after Donald Trump’s incoming counter-terrorism chief declared that British members of ISIS currently residing in Syrian prison camps should be repatriated.
Sebastian Gorka, who will have a key role in the Trump administration, stated that any nation wishing to be seen as a “serious ally” of the US should now commit to taking back citizens in northeastern Syria. However, Mr Lammy has made it clear that the Government would “always put British security interests first and the safeguarding of our population.”
In an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, he said: “Shamima Begum will not be coming back to the UK. It’s gone right through the courts. She’s not a UK national. We will not be bringing her back to the UK. We’re really clear about that. We will act in our security interests. And many of those in those camps are dangerous, are radicals.”
Mr Lammy added that if they were to return to the UK, some of these individuals “would have to be, frankly, jailed as soon as they arrived”.
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