Dawood family terrorist cell
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The Dawood family terrorist cell refers to thirteen members of the same British Pakistani family who left the United Kingdom and joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria. First to leave was Ahmed Dawood. He had been fighting with ISIL in Syria for over a year when his three sisters and their nine children left their homes in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England together to join him in May 2015.[1]
The Dawood siblings were Ahmed, who was 21 in 2015, and his sisters Sugra, 34, Zohra, 33, and Khadija, 30. Sugra took her five children: Junaid Ahmed Iqbal, 15, Ibraham Iqbal, 14, Zaynab Iqbal, 8, Mariya Iqbal, 5, and Ismaeel Iqbal, 3. Zohra took her daughters: Haaiyah Binte Zubair, 8, and Nurah Binte Zubair, 5. Khadija took her two children: Maryam Siddiqui, 7, and Muhamad Hasseb, 5.[2][3] The women left their husbands behind.[1]
The Dawood family had nine children, two sons and seven daughters, all born and raised in Bradford.[1][4] The Dawood parents are Pashtun and the family practiced a conservative form of Islam.[4][5]
Zohra and her brother Ahmed were particularly close to one another, and Zohra was upset after his departure for Syria in 2013 or 2014.[1][4] Counterterrorism police encouraged the family to maintain contact with Ahmed after he joined the Syrian jihad.[6] Sugra reportedly kept in touch with Ahmed over Skype.[7] The sisters' husbands later suggested that by encouraging contact with Ahmed, the police had been "complicit in the grooming and radicalizing of the women."[8]
Zohra was in an arranged marriage with her husband, a first cousin from Pakistan.[1] He was an imam at a local mosque[9] and Quran classes were hosted in the couple's home.[5] Zohra reportedly enrolled at the University of Huddersfield. She and her sisters also attended Arabic language classes and were reportedly dedicated students.[5]
Neighbours of the couple said they rarely saw Zohra but that her husband was a very involved parent. One neighbour, for a while, had thought her husband was a single father. According to the neighbours, Zohra was religious and knew a lot about Islam. She had previously worn Western clothes with a headscarf, but after she moved back into her father's home she began wearing a full veil and gloves.[1] Zohra reportedly confided in a friend that she was unhappy in her marriage and no longer shared a bed with her husband, and said she wanted to move to Saudi Arabia with her daughters because the UK was changing and "I don't want my children living in this society.”[10][11]
Zohra and her husband separated in the autumn of 2014.[1] Her husband later said his wife had "shunned" him. She took their daughters and moved back into her parents' home a mile away from her own. Khadija and her husband and their five children also lived with the Dawood parents. A few weeks later, Zohra's husband returned to his own elderly father's home in Pakistan, and never spoke to his wife again.[3]
Sugra's two oldest sons, Junaid and Ibrahim Iqbal, attended Dixon Kings Academy.[12] Ibrahim created a website a few years before leaving, called "An 11-year-old’s point of view about Islam". He and his brother both had Facebook accounts.[5]
Junaid posted quotes from the Quran and from Islamic scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah on his page, as well as photos from Doctor Who and Arrow. On his Facebook page, Ibrahim posted about a YouTube film, "Sword of Allah", the story of a Muslim warrior who "sought martyrdom in a hundred battles." He "liked" the Facebook page for the radical cleric Ahmad Musa Jibril, as well as the one for Ismail Menk, a cleric who called gay people "filth" and who had been banned from speaking at British universities. Ibrahim also "liked" the Facebook pages for several professional boxers, posted selfies taken in his school uniform, and shared posts from the site UNILAD.[5] Shortly before his and his family's disappearance, Ibrahim told one of his aunt Zohra's friends, "I’m going to Syria to fight."[7][11]
Departure for Syria
On 19 March 2015, the Dawood sisters and their children attempted to fly out of Manchester Airport to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia but were prevented from doing so and questioned by security about their intentions under the Terrorism Act of 2000. They said they planned to go on a religious pilgrimage. The questioning caused them to miss their flight.[7][9][13]
The women went to the police and complained that they had been prevented from flying, and sought written permission to leave Britain. A detective constable from the West Yorkshire Police wrote a letter for them, saying, "I can confirm the passengers do not have any restrictions on their movements out of or into the United Kingdom." The letter said they had been questioned by Greater Manchester Police "due to an ongoing Police investigation into a separate person" meaning Ahmed Dawood.[13] The women also sent formal written requests to ask that their school-age children be allowed to be absent from school for the time spent on pilgrimage, but got replies saying the requests were denied and their children's absences would be marked as unexcused.[14]
The sisters and their children left for Saudi Arabia on 28 May and this time they were able to fly.[3] They were supposed to return to the UK on June 11.[7] Instead, on 9 June, the family members boarded a flight from Medina to Istanbul.[1] The sisters paid cash for the flight. They then crossed the border into Syria in two groups.[10] The first group went on June 17, and the second on June 18.[15]
On 17 June, Zohra left a voicemail for her family back in England, saying she was in Syria and had left because of the continued surveillance by counterterrorism police, which she called "oppressive."[8]
Aftermath of disappearance
Sugra and Khadija's husbands made televised pleas begging them to return with the children. Sugra's husband cried during his statement, saying, "We had a perfect relationship, we had a lovely family. I don’t know what happened."[1] He also addressed his oldest son Junaid directly, asking the 15-year-old boy to contact him if he saw the broadcast.[16] A lawyer representing the two husbands said they were "normal people" who had had "no inkling" of their wives' plans.[17] Zohra's estranged husband in Pakistan said he was "shocked" by what had happened.[3]
The women's parents said they did not support their daughters' "leaving their husbands and families in the UK and of taking their children into a war zone where life is not safe to join any group" and added, "We plead to anyone thinking about making a similar journey not to go."[10]
Later in 2015, another British Pakistani family from Bradford, the Ameens, also disappeared and were also thought to have travelled to Syria. Farzana and Imran Ameen bought one-way tickets to Turkey for themselves and their five children 1 to 15 years of age, and left on October 6, 2015. Imran's brother had traveled to Turkey months earlier and was thought to be in Syria.[18] In January 2016, the police launched a fresh appeal for information as to the whereabouts of both the Dawood family and the Ameen family.[19]