Sunday December 6, 2020
By DIPESH GADHER
Nasra Abukar, when she was 18 years old. Has now been located in a camp in Syria.
Nasra Abukar, when she was 18 years old. Has now been located in a camp in Syria.
A British teenage girl who was the subject of a national missing persons appeal has been found six years later in a detention camp in Syria for jihadi brides.
Nasra Abukar sparked a widespread search when she vanished from her home in Lewisham, southeast London, when she was 18.
It can now be revealed that she was persuaded to travel to Syria and married an Islamic State fighter from Cardiff, Wales, with whom she had two sons, Faris and Talha. Faris was killed in a coalition airstrike that also injured his father, but Talha, 3, remains with his mother at the Kurdish-run al-Hawl detention camp in northeast Syria.
Like Shamima Begum, the runaway East London schoolgirl who was discovered in the same camp last year, Abukar desperately wants to be allowed to return to Britain despite having had her citizenship revoked on national security grounds.
Messages on social media, which she is believed to have posted, poke fun at the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, which killed 130 people, and promote life in the now-defunct ISIS “caliphate”.
At the weekend Abukar’s mother, Kaha, expressed shock that her daughter had married into ISIS.
“I don’t have any contact with her,” she said. “I don’t know her husband. When Nasra left here, she was 18. She was an adult. It’s not my fault.”
Her parents, who are of Somali origin, are believed to have reported her disappearance to police in June 2014. Her case was taken up soon afterwards by the Missing People national charity. An image of the teenager in a hijab was posted online.
A tweet featuring the appeal was reposted by one of Abukar’s family, followed by a series of increasingly worried messages. One said: “When the night closes in, my fear just doubles up. But we have so much faith in u that you’ll return safely!!! #nasra@abukar#we#love#u.”
Unbeknown to her family, Abukar had secretly made plans to flee Britain and travel to Syria where she married Aseel Muthana, an ISIS fighter and propagandist from Cardiff. He is also believed to have taken a second wife.
Using the alias Umm Faris — which means “mother of Faris” in Arabic — Abukar, now 24, used several accounts on Twitter to champion life under Islamic State to her Western followers.
One post on November 14, 2015, when an ISIS-trained cell carried out a massacre in the French capital, simply stated “Paris” alongside a “crying with laughter” emoji.
Abukar and Muthana, who is also 24, are believed to have remained with ISIS until it made its last stand in Baghouz in eastern Syria in spring 2019.
Asked if she wanted to see her daughter and grandson, Abukar’s mother said: “It’s not in my hands if she can return. That’s for the government. I can do nothing for her.”
THE SUNDAY TIMES