The photographs were published in newspapers across the world. In one close-up picture, Kadiza Sultana is a smiling, bespectacled girl in a headscarf who does not look older than her 16 years. In another – a grainy CCTV still – she is walking through Gatwick airport with her friends Amira Abase and Shamima Begum, both 15, in February 2015. The final image shows them several hours later at a bus station in western Istanbul. After they set off for the 17-hour trip to the Syrian border, there were no more photographs.
The three teenagers, popular straight-A students at the Bethnal Green Academy in east London (since renamed Green Spring Academy Shoreditch), were on their way to join Islamic State. That Isis was able to appeal to men in the West was already well known, but this was the first instance of a group of young women making the journey together. The “jihadi brides”, as they were described in the press, were legally children but commentators, including Grace Dent in the Independent, called for them to be barred from ever re-entering the country. The finger was pointed at the parents – even as they made desperate public appeals for their daughters to return – then at the school, then at the police.
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