Al Hol, the camp inhabited by Isis immigrant women in Al- Hasakah, Syria. Photo / Getty Images
Dubbed the 'terror twins' in the media, Zahra and Salma Halane remain committed Islamic State supporters, according to women in Al Hol
A woman from Manchester who joined Islamic State (Isis) as a teenager along with her twin sister is alive and being held with her young son in a controversial camp run by Syrian Kurdish forces, sources in northeast Syria have confirmed to The Telegraph.
Salma and Zahra Halane were 16 when they fled their home in Chorlton in June 2014 to travel to Syria, but their fate has not been known since Isis lost the last of its territory in fighting against Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in March 2019.
Zahra was recently caught trying to escape from the sprawling Al Hol camp, where she had lived for 16 months, and was transferred last week from a women's prison to a new high-security extension to Roj camp, where humanitarians worry the most dangerous Isis supporters are being moved, sources in the camps said.
Salma's whereabouts is unknown but she is also believed to be alive. Dubbed the "terror twins" in the media, Zahra and Salma remain committed Isis supporters, according to women in Al Hol.
The fact their presence went unreported and that at least one of them attempted to escape illustrates the danger of leaving tens of thousands of jihadists under the guard of a militia in a war-torn country, experts say.
The Halane twins, who moved to Manchester at a young age from Denmark, crossed into Syria in July 2014, shortly after Isis declared a caliphate.
The twins, whose elder brother had reportedly travelled to Syria the year before, moved to Raqqa, the caliphate's capital, and soon married Islamic State fighters.
Their youth and apparent enthusiasm for life under Isis attracted widespread attention, and their journey to jihad was later copied by the Bethnal Green trio - teenage girls from an academy in London of whom only Shamima Begum is known to have survived.
By early 2019, the once sprawling caliphate was reduced to a small pocket of territory outside Baghouz in eastern Syria. While tens of thousands of Isis supporters like Begum surrendered to the Western-backed SDF, many remained missing.
Begum's classmates Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana are believed to have died, but others without identification documents entered the camps, where there was little to stop them giving partial or incorrect biographical information.
Last month, Russia Today Arabic aired an interview with a woman The Telegraph has identified as Zahra after she was caught trying to escape from Al Hol, where some 10,000 foreign women and children live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in an annex separate from more than 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi citizens in the rest of the camp.
"I want to go back home," the woman says, speaking Arabic.
"If you have money, there are different ways [of escaping] and it happens very fast. You can get to Turkey easily."
A network of corrupt guards and drivers using hidden compartments inside water tankers has developed to traffic people from Al Hol into Turkey.
The cost is about £12,000 (NZ$24,000), according to researcher Vera Mironava, and is often sent by relatives abroad via informal money transfer systems. A Turkish woman who escaped from Al Hol said she knew the twins in the Islamic State and afterwards in the camp.
"I've known them for over five years," the woman told The Telegraph, speaking anonymously. "We visited each other".
"I don't know where the other one might be honestly, but they left together," she said, referring to Salma and their escape attempt.
The Telegraph has also reviewed screenshots of messages purportedly from other women in Al Hol confirming the twins are alive. They know Zahra by her nickname Umm Zubair and Salma as Umm Abdurrahman.
Zahra has a 4- or 5-year-old son named Ismail, while Salma's son was reportedly killed in fighting at Baghouz. The government is believed to have revoked the twins' residency and subjected them to an exclusion order, meaning they would be unable to re-enter the UK.
A Home Office spokeswoman said: "We do not comment on individual cases."
The twins have told camp authorities they are Danish and are believed to want to return there.
"They want to go to Denmark because it's likely that they will be free there, unlike in Britain," the Turkish woman said.
Denmark's foreign ministry said it does not comment on individual cases or provide specific numbers concerning Danish nationals in northeast Syria.
Relatives in the UK indicated to The Telegraph that they know the twins are alive. Speaking at the family's home in Manchester, their mother Khadra Jama said: "They have been banned from the UK."
Speaking through a translator she added: "The UK government did not help me when they left. They were 16 years old when they left, they have been away for six years and they left from the airport and nobody helped them."
She declined to comment further, as did other relatives contacted by The Telegraph. Leaving thousands of Isis supporters like the twins in insecure Syrian camps undermines efforts to prevent a resurgence of the group, said Shiraz Maher, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London.
"There is disagreement over what should be done with them but the idea that people [be left there to] escape is really the worst case scenario," Maher said, advocating for trials in their home countries.
The SDF and the US-led coalition against Islamic State have repeatedly called on governments to repatriate their citizens.
"The best disposition option for detained foreign terrorist fighters is for home countries to repatriate, prosecute, and, where appropriate, incarcerate them," coalition spokesman Capt Matthew Morris said.
Born to Somali refugees in Denmark, the Halane twins moved with their family at a young age to Manchester, where they attended Whalley Range High School.
Bright girls from a conservative religious family, they completed 28 GCSEs between them and were described as well-liked pupils. Their older brother Ahmed, who later returned from Syria to Denmark, likely introduced them to Islamic State ideology but had not actively recruited them, a source close to the family told BBC in 2015.
In December 2013, Salma was caught viewing Islamic State propaganda at school, according to Jakob Sheikh, a terrorism expert at Politiken newspaper in Denmark. Once in Syria, Twitter accounts attributed to the twins documented life in the caliphate.
They celebrated terror attacks, posted photos of weapons training and encouraged other westerns to join Islamic State. By December 2014, Zahra reported her and her sister's husbands had been killed fighting.
"LOOL we made hijrah [migration] together now iddah [widows] together," she wrote. The twins were at the heart of the British jihadist social scene in the Islamic State, a Moroccan woman told the Sunday Times in 2017.
Among the visitors to Salma's house was Aine Davis, one of the four Britons known as the Beatles involved in torturing and executing western hostages, the woman said.
The site was used by Hezbollah to plan attacks on Israeli civilians.