How 3 British Sisters And Their 9 Kids Were Lured To Join ISIS

By R. Siva Kumar - 18 Jun '15 02:19AM

One phone call to a British father from children moving to Syria was explicit: "We love you, we're missing you, we can't wait to come home," according to dailymail.

So far, the children had had a happy life in Yorkshire, going by their photographs. While five-year-old Mariya was fond of dressing up with her sister Zaynab, eight, and playing in the garden with her three-year-old brother Ismaeel, or boat in the lake, it was during their last school holiday that their mother, Sugra Dawood, 34, took her children without their father Akhtar to migrate to the Islamic State.

Khadija Dawood, 30, Sugra Dawood, 34, and Zohra Dawood, 33, whose children are aged between three and 15, disappeared after going on an Islamic pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, according to telegraph. Distraught, their fathers made an emotional appeal to their wives, begging them to bring the children back.

Inside sources say that the lure was caused by the younger brother, Ahmed, who was living within IS for a year. He seems to have convinced Sugra through Skype to come over for 'what is right'. She then went on to sign up sisters Khadija, 29, and Zohra, 32.

While Sugra had at first asked her brother to return to UK, Ahmed, 21, had replied: "I have burnt my passport and am never coming back."

He explained to Sugra that she would follow his footsteps if she got to know what Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was "doing to our women and children". He told her that "genuine IS supporters" were not initiating beheadings or other atrocities.

"He kept on justifying what was going on, and giving reasons, and Sugra seemed to be open to persuasion," said the friend. On one occasion Sugra said: 'If we don't help them, what type of Muslims are we?' She started speaking sympathetically about them."

Meanwhile, police sources said that the sisters had contacted one of their family members, and confirmed that they had crossed into Syria, according to theguardian.

Russ Foster, assistant chief constable, said: "We are concerned about anyone who has or is intending to travel to the part of Syria that is controlled by the terrorist group calling itself Islamic State. It is an extremely dangerous place and not a place where young children should be taken."

The Dawoods had immigrated to Britain in the ''70s. Mohammad Dawood, a former market trader, and wife Sara Begum came to Britain from a village in the Pathan community in the north-west frontier of Pakistan, near the Afghan border. Mr Dawood was born in India and his wife in Pakistan.

They got seven children beginning from 1979 to 1993---two boys and seven girls in Bradford. The youngest brother, Ahmed, had been a 'normal' youngster but had got lured into the IS war in Syria recently.

An inside source explained that "Ahmed became the primary carer for his father and did everything for him. Ahmed was a very normal and typical young man. He was not evil and not a fanatic at all, he was not pious, never went to the mosque and was just an everyday lad."

It was when he began to watch jihadi recruitment videos that he began to see Assad's forces "raping women and torturing children", and "he became a different person," said the friend.

Although Ahmed was like a "son" to Sugra when his parents left for Pakistan for a while, he used the time to brainwash his sister, explaining that foreign governments could not be trusted to deal with the Syrian regime deftly. "If we don't do anything our brothers and sisters are going to get killed," he said.

An year ago, he had told his family that he was visiting Pakistan, and linked with militants with whom he had communicated online. Later, he informed his sisters that he had "friends in Syria who arranged everything."

Sugra deftly took thousands of pounds from a bank account and finally left with her sisters. Sugra's husband, Akhtar Iqbal, clarified that he "cannot live without" his wife Sugra Dawood.

Zohra has Haafiyah (8) and Nurah (5), and was recently divorced from husband Zubair Iqbal, and is now in Pakistan. Last year, she had suffered when her disabled son died. Her two older children, Junaid (15) and Ibrahim (14), are all intelligent and performing well, even as Junaid will take his GCSEs soon.

Their last photographs showed them "happy and smiling" at Manchester airport, but in a week they called their father and told him that they missed him terribly. The father has not heard anything else apart from a message that the children were with him.