16 year olds Salma (centre left) and Zahra Halane (centre right),
who were among the top 20 students at their girls' school in Manchester,
left their parents' home in the middle of the night and caught a flight
to Turkey, before crossing the border. Police said the pair are thought
to have followed their elder brother, who ditched his own 'excellent'
academic career to join the ISIS terror group around a year ago. Friends
said the twins had appeared to be typical teenagers, pouting for
selfies & shopping at Primark - but they are now feared to be training
for battle. Pictured left are visitors arriving at the family's home. Continue to read full story...
T
win schoolgirls who followed their jihadi brother to Syria were hard-working students who hoped to train as doctors.
Sixteen-year-olds
Salma and Zahra Halane, who last summer achieved 28 GCSEs between them,
left their parents’ home in the middle of the night and caught a flight
to Turkey, before crossing the border.
Police
said the pair are thought to have followed their elder brother, who
ditched his own ‘excellent’ academic career to join the ISIS terror
group around a year ago.
Friends said the twins had appeared to
be typical teenagers, pouting for selfies and shopping at Primark – but
they are now feared to be training for battle.
Last
night a rebel fighter boasted that he was teaching girls as young as 16
how to fight. Yilmaz, a Dutch national who has been in Syria for two
years, told Sky News: ‘It’s extremely easy to get here. People go on
holiday ... they end up in Syria.’
The twins’ parents raised the alarm last month, after finding the girls’ beds empty and their passports and clothes missing.
A former neighbour said the couple had
been ‘quite strict’, and did not allow the girls to ‘mix with other
children on the street’. Others recalled that the twins wore headscarves
when they were as young as nine. But Rhea Headlam, who sat next to
Zahra in primary school, said they were ‘just normal teenage girls’.
‘I’m really shocked – I used to bump into them at Primark,’ she added. ‘They were both really clever.’
Last
summer Salma achieved 13 GCSEs – 11 of them at grades A* to C – while
Zahra passed 15, of which 12 were A*-C. The results put them in the top
10 per cent of their year group at Whalley Range High School for Girls
in Manchester.
They went on
to study at Connell Sixth Form College, where fellow students said they
hoped to follow in the footsteps of their elder sister Hafsa, 25, who
is at medical school in Denmark after graduating from Manchester
University.
‘The twins both have aspirations to
become doctors – that is their ambition,’ said one. Another claimed it
was ‘typical’ of the girls to head to Syria ‘after they had finished
term’, adding: ‘They wouldn’t want to mess up their education.
‘I’m shocked they have gone. They didn’t seem to be radical or extremist in their views.’
It
emerged yesterday that the girls’ devoutly Muslim Somali refugee
parents and their 11 children had been moved from an estate made famous
by the TV series Shameless to an upmarket suburb, after telling the
council they needed more bedrooms.
They
were given a six-bedroom end-terrace despite the protests of the
existing tenant. Yesterday the large back and front gardens were strewn
with discarded household items and children’s plastic toys.
The
house's previous resident - a 40-year-old Army heroine who served in
Bosnia - said last night she had been booted out of the house by
Manchester City Council so the twins and their family could move in.
Former lance corporal Dawn Benjamin told The Sun she had thought the house - her childhood home - would be 'going to a good family'.
She added: 'I lost my life, memories, everything I'd grown up with, to house jihadi wannabes'.
Ms
Benjamin and her young son had to move out after they were served with a
court order. The council confirmed the house had been needed for a
larger family.
Neighbours said the twins’ parents
were keen to share elements of Somalian culture with them, taking round
dishes of traditional delicacies for them to try. The twins’ father
Ibrahim is understood to teach at a nearby mosque, where leaders this
week issued a statement repudiating extremism and opposing violence of
all kinds.
Mohammed
Shafiq, of the Ramadan Foundation, said the family were moderate
Muslims who know all about the dangers of war-torn countries. ‘They were
desperately unhappy to discover [their son] had gone to Syria, and they
thought they were keeping a watchful eye on their other children. Then
this happens,’ he said.
Sources
believe Salma and Zahra were inspired by their brother’s transformation
into a jihadi fighter, and became radicalised themselves while viewing
extremist Islamist material online.
According
to police sources, their brother also travelled to the family’s native
Somalia, where he may have linked up with another Islamist terror group
al-Shabab.
A friend told The Sun the brother was known for his ability to recite long passages of the Koran.
Officers
are investigating how the girls funded their own trip, over fears they
have been bankrolled by jihadi fighters who want them as their wives.
Culled from UK Daily Mail
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