Ahmed, Salma and Zahra Halane

The siblings are from a Muslim family of Somali descent.^[6] They were born in Skejby in Denmark, the offspring of refugees.^[5] The Halane family moved to the Manchester, England area when the siblings were young.^[2] The family was very religious, and father ran a Quranic studies school^[7] and is a prominent Quran reciter in the local community.^[8][9]

Zahra and Salma attended Whalley Range High School.^[10] The twins were well-liked among their peers and highly intelligent.^[8] They achieved 28 GCSEs between them.^[10][11] They began studying for their A-levels at Connell Sixth Form College.^[12] They both wanted to become doctors.^[11] 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] At age eighteen, Ahmed got married, and he and his wife had a daughter.^[13]

He knew other people who traveled to Syria to join ISIL 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]

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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.^[11] Authorities believe Ahmed was responsible for radicalizing his sisters.^[3]

In December 2013, Salma was caught looking at ISIL propaganda at school.^[10][14] 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.^[14]

On June 26, 2014,^[4] Zahra and Salma left their home together, flying out of Manchester Airport to Turkey without their parents' knowledge.^[15] They stole £840 in cash from their father and traveled to Istanbul with a couple and an infant, posing as a family group.^[16] The twins then went to Syria, arriving on July 9^[8] just after ISIL declared a caliphate.^[10]

Both girls married foreign ISIL fighters.^[2] Zahra married Ali Kalantar.^[5][8] Kalantar was from Coventry and had been accepted to several universities before he left for Syria in March 2014, three months before the twins.^[17] Salma married Walid Khalil, who grew up near London.^[18] Zahra took the nom de guerre Umm Zubair, and Salma took the nom de guerre Umm Abdurrahman.^[10]

Later in July their parents went to the Turkish border to try to find their children.^[9][19] They were accompanied by a male friend. The friend and the girls' mother 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. They were detained 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.^[9] The court ordered the release of the twins' mother and her friend, and the twins' parents returned to the United Kingdom without them.^[12][19]

Zahra and Salma were active on social media as recruiters and propagandists for ISIL.^[11] Both of them posted photos and details of their lives and praise in celebration of terror attacks.^[10][11] 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] The twins encouraged other women to travel to ISIL territory, providing advice on how to avoid the notice of security agencies.^[8]

On December 4, 2014, Zahra tweeted that her husband Ali Kalantar had been killed.^[8] Kalantar was reportedly killed in a French airstrike at Tikrit University in Iraq.^[17] On December 12, Salma's husband Walid Khalil was killed in an airstrike and she announced his death on Twitter also.^[8] Zahra wrote that she and Salma "made hijrah together now iddah together".^[10] She later remarried, to another ISlL fighter, and he was killed in battle.^[5]

In May 2015, the BBC reported Ahmed was living in Denmark, and a reporter spoke to him. He was reportedly being monitored by Danish intelligence, but had not been charged with any criminal offenses due to a lack of evidence.^[2]

Abdullahi Ahmed Jama Farah, the Halane siblings' cousin, was convicted of preparing for terrorist acts in February 2016.^[20] The prosecution said Farah was an ISIL supporter who had created a "hub of communication" for extremists in his mother's Manchester home starting in 2013.^[20][21] As well as his cousins, Farah knew three British men who had traveled to Syria to join ISIL, one of them Raphael Hostey.^[22] Farah was sentenced to seven years at a young offenders institution. In 2021, he was sentenced to an additional five months for attacking a prison officer.^[23]

In an interview with the Manchester Evening News in 2017, Islam Mitat, a Moroccan woman who had been taken to ISIL territory against her will by her Afghan-British husband but had escaped, said she had lived in the same house as Salma in Raqqa, ISIL’s Syrian capital,^[24] in an area known as "Little Britain" because so many British foreign fighters and their families lived there. Mitat's husband, Ahmed Khalil, was Salma's husband Walid Khalil’s brother, and Mitat moved in with Walid and Salma after her own husband’s death. She stated Salma and Zahra spent a lot of time together and that the twins, who taught her how to speak English, had "crowed" over news of terrorist attacks in Europe. She also said Salma had helped recruit a 15-year-old girl from Bristol, Yusra Hussien.^[18] Mitat said as the number of airstrikes increased in Raqqa, Salma bought a car and spoke of plans to leave the war-torn city and travel deeper into ISIL territory.^[24]

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.^[10]

Zahra and Salma were sent to the Al-Hawl refugee camp. Other women in the camp said both twins were still committed ISIL supporters.^[10] Their mother told The Daily Telegraph Zahra and Salma had been banned from the UK, and the twins themselves told the camp authorities and ITV News that they wanted to be repatriated to Denmark.^[10][25]

In the summer of 2020, the twins were caught trying to escape the camp with Zahra's son.^[25] As a result, Zahra was transferred to a high security section of another camp, Al-Roj.^[10] Salma said poor conditions were the reason they had tried to escape, citing bad water and a 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."^[25]

In 2024, the Danish Supreme Court decided to repatriate Zahra and her son together because to do otherwise would be a violation of the human rights of the boy, who inherited Danish citizenship through her. Salma remains in Syria.^[5]

In January 2026, Zahra was sentenced to five years in prison by a court in Aarhus, Denmark for joining ISIL and receiving weapons training through them. The court did not believe her defense that she had gone to Syria to do charity work. At her sentencing, Zahra was warned that a second conviction could see her deported from Denmark, as she was administratively stripped of her Danish citizenship while in Syria. She was not deported only because her nine-year-old son was dependent on her.^[5]

• Shamima Begum – British-born woman who joined the IS (born 1999)
• Aqsa Mahmood – Scottish woman who joined ISIL (1993–2019)
• Ugbad and Rahma Sadiq, two Norwegian sisters who traveled to Syria to join ISIL
• Ifthekhar Jaman, one of the first British men to join ISIL
• Omar Shafik Hammami, an American citizen who joined al Shabaab
• Brides of the Islamic State