Ahmed, Salma and Zahra Halane are three siblings of Danish nationality who are notable for all having left their family home in Britain to join jihadist groups. Salma and Zahra are twins; Ahmed is their older brother. [1] Ahmed is alleged to have fought with al-Shabaab in Somalia and to have joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Syria in 2013. [2] [3] In 2014, Zahra and Salma ran away to join ISIL in Syria. They were sixteen years old at the time. [4]
The siblings are from a Muslim family of thirteen [5] and are of Somali descent. [6] They were born in Denmark, then moved to the Manchester, England area as children. [2] Their father, Ibrahim Halane, ran a Quranic studies school [7] and is a prominent Quran reciter in the local community. [8] Ibrahim knows Arabic and taught the language to Ahmed. [7] People who knew the Halane family described them as very religious. [5] [8]
Zahra and Salma attended Whalley Range High School. [9] The twins were well-liked among their peers and highly intelligent. [8] They achieved 28 GCSEs between them. [9] [10] They began studying for their A-levels at Connell Sixth Form College. [11] They both wanted to become doctors [10] like their older sister. [5]
Ahmed attended Burnage Academy for Boys. He said he began studying the Quran at age five and had memorized it by the time he was thirteen years old. [2] [7] Ibrahim was his teacher, and by his mid-teens Ahmed was teaching Quran to children himself. [7] At age eighteen, Ahmed got married, and he and his wife had a daughter. [12] He knew other people who traveled to Syria to join ISIS in late 2013. [2] That same year, Ahmed left the UK and traveled to Egypt, supposedly to study. He was about twenty years old at the time. [2]
Ahmed dropped out of sight in Egypt and later admitted he had traveled to Somalia, where he reportedly joined the jihadist group Al Shabaab. [2] Later that year he reportedly traveled to Manbij in Syria and fought in ISIL there, [3] although he denied this. [2] He was banned from return to the United Kingdom, as a security risk. [10] Authorities believe Ahmed was responsible for radicalizing his sisters. [3] A source told the BBC he had not told the girls to come but they were inspired by his example. [2]
In December 2013, Salma was caught looking at ISIL propaganda at school. [9] [13] When a teacher confronted her, she said she was looking at images of the Syrian civil war in hopes of finding Ahmed in them. Because the images she was looking at were on a mainstream news site, the teacher believed her and advised her to talk to her parents about Ahmed's disappearance. [13]
On June 26, 2014, [4] Zahra and Salma left their home together, flying out Manchester Airport to Turkey without their parents' knowledge [14] and went to Syria, arriving on July 9 [8] just after ISIL declared a caliphate. [9] Their family pleaded for them to come home, but the twins said they had no intention of coming back. [6] Both married foreign ISIL fighters. [2] Zahra married Ali Kalantar, a 19-year-old British man of Afghan descent. [8]
Later in July their parents went to the Turkish border to try to find their children. [5] [15] By then one of the twins was reportedly living in al-Bab and the other in Manbij. [15] The couple was accompanied to the Syrian border by a friend, Ahmad Walid Rashidi, a Muslim of Afghan origin who worked at a charity in Denmark. [5] [15]
Rashidi and the girls' mother, Khadra Jama, left the girls' father at the border and crossed into Syria to try to meet with Zahra and Salma. They were arrested by ISIL militants, wrongly suspected of spying. [5] They were detailed for 36 days in separate jails before being taken before an ISIL court, where Zahra and Salma also appeared. The twins told the court they did not want to return to Europe, and their husbands were not willing to give permission for them to travel. [5] The court ordered the release of Jama and Rashidi, [5] and the twins' parents returned to the United Kingdom without them. [11] [15]
Zahra and Salma were active on social media as recruiters and propagandists for ISIL. [10] Both of them posted photos and details of their lives and praise in celebration of terror attacks. [9] [10] Both girls had accounts on Twitter and Salma had an account on Ask.fm where she responded to anonymous questions. [8] One of Zahra's first tweets said, "Happy #9/11 Happiest day of my life. Hopefully more to come. inSha Allah #IS". [8] She once tweeted images of a group of women training with weapons in Raqqa. [14] Another photo showed her posing in a niqab with an AK-47, kneeling before an ISIL flag. She also posted that her husband had thrown out her new kitten. [14]
On December 4, 2014, Zahra announced her husband had been killed, tweeting, "He was a blessing from Allah swt. please make dua Allah accepts him and I will join him very sooooon. :-)" [8] On December 12, Salma's husband was killed in an airstrike and she announced his death on Twitter also, saying she was "honoured" to be "among the wifes of shuhadah." [8] Zahra wrote, "we made hijrah (migration) together now iddah (widows) together". [9] Following her husband's death, Salma may have moved to Raqqa, nearer her sister. [8] Aine Davis reportedly visited Salma's house. [9] The twins encouraged other women to travel to ISIL territory, providing advice on how to avoid the notice of security agencies. [8]
In May 2015, the BBC reported Ahmed was living in Denmark, and a reporter spoke to him. He said he had been in touch with his sisters in Syria, who were reportedly living in Manbij by this time, but neither of them had been online for about a month. [2] At the time of the interview he had, within the past three weeks, started attending the a mosque which had been accused of promoting extremism. He associated with other former jihadists who had returned home from Syria and he was reportedly being monitored by Danish intelligence, but hasn't been charged with any criminal offenses due to lack of evidence. [2]
Abdullahi Ahmed Jama Farah, the Halane siblings' cousin, was convicted of preparing for terrorist acts in February 2016. [16] The prosecution said Farah was an ISIL supporter who had created in his mother's Manchester home a "hub of communication" for extremists starting in 2013 while he was studying for his A levels, [16] [17] and that he had helped a 19-year-old British man travel to Syria. [16] As well as his cousins, Farah knew three men British men who had traveled to Syria to join ISIL, one of them Raphael Hostey. [18] Farah was sentenced to seven years at a young offenders institution with an extended licence period of three years.
In March 2019, ISIL lost the last of its territory in the Battle of Baghuz Fawqani. Salma's son was reportedly killed in the fighting while Zahra's son, aged four or five, survived. [9]
Zahra and Salma were sent to the Al-Hawl refugee camp. Other women in the camp said both twins were still committed ISIL supporters. [9] Their mother told The Daily Telegraph Zahra and Salma had been banned from the UK, and the twins themselves have told the camp authorities and ITV News that they want to be repatriated to Denmark. [9] [19]
In the summer of 2020, the twins were caught trying to escape the camp with Zahra's son. [19] As a result, Zahra was transferred to a high security section of another camp, Al-Roj. [9] Salma said poor conditions were the reason they had tried to escape, citing bad water and lack of medical treatment. She told The Guardian , "We have nothing to do with the Islamic State. I see myself as a victim. I am not happy about the Islamic State." [19]
In 2021, Farah was denied parole due to his behavior in prison. [20]