A woman who was the subject of a national missing persons appeal has been found six years later in a Syrian detention camp for jihadi brides, as reported by The Sunday Times.
Nasra Abukar, 24, disappeared from her Lewisham family home in 2014 aged 18. It has now emerged Abukar was persuaded to travel to Syria and married an ISIS fighter from Cardiff, 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-Hol detention camp in north east Syria.
Reports claim that Abukar is looking to return to Britain despite having had her citizenship revoked on the grounds of national security. Abukar’s mother said she has not had any contact with her daughter, and is shocked her daughter married into ISIS.
“I don’t have any contact with her,” her mother said this weekend. “I don’t know her husband. When Nasra left here, she was 18. She was an adult. It’s not my fault.”
“It’s not in my hands if she can return. That’s for the government. I can do nothing for her,” she said.
Abukar had secretly planned to travel to Syria to marry ISIS fighter and propagandist Aseel Muthana – a British terrorist who left Wales to join the Islamic State in 2013. The couple are believed to have remained with ISIS until its last piece of territory, the town of Bargouz in eastern Syria, was recaptured in March 2019.
Muthana, 24, who spoke in an interview last month, said he had last seen Abukar when the town fell. He is also reported to have taken a second wife.
It is believed Abukar and Muthana stayed with Isis until its last stand in Baghouz in early 2019. Abukar had used the alias Umm Faris, meaning ‘mother of Faris’, to preach the supposed virtues of the Islamic State online, reports say.
In one social media post from November 2015, following a massacre in France’s capital by an Isis-trained man which killed 130 people, she simply wrote ‘Paris’ with a ‘crying with laughter’ emoji, it has been reported.
The Syrian camp where Abukar was discovered is the same place that Bethnal Green schoolgirl Shamima Begum was found last year. Britain’s Supreme Court is expected to make a decision soon on Begum’s case, which could allow her to return to the UK.
