Three British girls were married to ISIS fighters. But now they’ve escaped.
Three British teenage ‘jihadi brides’ appear to have changed their mind about living under ISIS control — and have gone on the run from the extremist group.
Their decision to flee has prompted militants to go door-to-door in Syria, attempting to track them down.
While the runaway girls’ identities have not been confirmed, their reported ages — about 16 years old, according to the Daily Mail — match those of Amira Abase, Kadiza Sultana, and Shamima Begum, the British school girls who fled their east London homes in February.
The reports that three jihadi brides had fled ISIS control were made by anonymous blogger and self-described independent historian Mosul Eye, who blogs about life in the ISIS-controlled city.
Writing on his Facebook page on 5 May, Mosul Eye wrote: “Three girls, (Foreigners – British) married to ISIL militants, reported missing, and ISIL announced to all its check points to search for them. It is believed that those girls have escaped.”
“The latest info I got on them is they are still on the run, but still in Mosul, and ISIL is thoroughly searching for them and hasn’t captured them yet,” he later added.
“They are Brits, not immigrants, and they are very young teens (around 16 years old). That’s all I have about them for now.”
The blogger wrote an update this morning, posting:
“We cannot confirm, as of yet, if those girls were the same trio mentioned in the British media, as their identities still unknown to us. We don’t have any new details about the girls, and unable to provide any assistance with this matter.”
The girls’ decision to flee comes just a fortnight after one of the girls, Amira, posted a photo to Twitter of a takeaway dinner she appeared to be enjoying with another teenage ‘jihadi bride’ in Syria.
Amira captioned the photograph of their spread: ‘dawla takeaway w/ @um_ayoub12’; “Dawla” is another name for ISIS.
Frighteningly, these British teenagers are far from alone in their decision to flee a safe country for a war zone. They are just a handful of the hundreds of western women lured to the Middle East by ISIS’ masterful social media strategy.
As Mamamia previously wrote, that strategy is specifically designed to recruit young women as brides, mothers, or members of the group’s all-female brigades, which patrol the streets to ensure civilian women’s compliance a strict form of Islamist morality.
Given ISIS’s appalling treatment of women — the organisation has published guidelines on “how to rape” and is involved in sex trafficking and forced marriages — it’s hard to understand why any woman would want to join a group known to violently enforce extremely conservative gender roles.
