In the half-term break of February 2015, three pupils at Bethnal Green academy followed their friend in travelling to Syria to join Isis.
Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, aged between 15 and 16 at the time, took a Turkish Airlines flight from Gatwick to Istanbul before crossing into Syria – the same route taken by Sharmeena Begum three months earlier.
Shamima Begum spoke to the Times on Wednesday (£) from a refugee camp in north-east Syria. She is nine months pregnant and desperate to come home to Britain. “I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child,” she said.
The details of what happened to the schoolgirls – who were described as gifted students – are patchy. All four ended up in Raqqa, where they were married off to jihadists who had come to Syria from around the world.
Begum married Yago Riedijk, 27, a Dutch convert to Islam, 10 days after arriving in the city in 2015. She said he had later been accused of spying and was tortured in prison before being released.
She then had her first child, a daughter called Sarayah. In January 2017, the family left Raqqa to live on the outskirts of the town of Mayadin. She had a son called Jerah before they moved again as Isis was pushed back by the Syrian Democratic Forces.
She told the Times her son died three months ago, aged eight months, of an unknown illness and malnutrition. She tried to take him to an Isis hospital but there were no drugs available and not enough medical staff.
Her daughter then grew sick and died aged one year and nine months. Heavily pregnant, she decided to flee to a refugee camp and her husband surrendered to Syrian forces. Begum has said all she wants to do is come home to the UK so her child can receive proper medical care.
Sultana reportedly married an American Isis fighter with Somali heritage, who was killed a short time later in a Russian airstrike. She told her family she was growing disillusioned with life in Raqqa, but was scared to try to leave.
In August 2016, ITV reported that Sultana’s family believed she had been killed, aged 17, in an airstrike on Raqqa that May. Her family’s lawyer said: “The family are devastated. A number of sources have said that she has been killed and she has not been in contact with the family for several weeks. Over a year ago, she had been talking about leaving. There was a plan to get her out.”
Speaking to the Times about her friend’s death, Shamima Begum said: “At first I was in denial. I thought if ever we did get killed, we’d get killed together.”
Amira Abase married an 18-year-old Australian jihadist, Abdullah Elmir, in July 2016. Elmir, who was described in Australian media as the “Ginger Jihadi”, was later reported by intelligence agencies to have been killed in coalition airstrikes.
Despite reports last year that Abase had been killed, Shamina Begum said she heard two weeks ago that she and Sharmeena Begum were still alive. They had decided to stay on in Baghuz, Isis’s last stronghold, where she last saw them in June.
Sharmeena Begum, the first of the girls to join Isis, travelled to Syria in December 2014 after 18 months of tumult in her private life. Her 33-year-old mother had died of lung cancer and her father, Mohammad Uddin, had remarried. She reportedly married a Bosnian, who was also killed.
“They were strong,” Shamina Begum said of her friends’ decision to stay. “I respect their decision. They urged patience and endurance in the caliphate and chose to stay behind in Baghuz. They would be ashamed of me if they survived the bombing and battle to learn that I had left.
“They made their choice as single women. For their husbands were already dead. It was their own choice as women to stay.”
