Shamima left her home with Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase in February 2015 to join a fourth Bethnal Green Academy schoolgirl in Syria — Sharmeena Begum, who left a few months earlier — where each married an ISIS foreign fighter. The 19-year-old told The Times newspaper Sultana was killed in a coalition airstrike on an ISIS targets in Raqqa in 2016.
She said: “There was some secret stuff in the basement of Kadiza’s house which a spy found out about and passed on to the coalition who bombed.
“I never thought it would happen. At first I was in denial. I thought if ever we did get killed we’d get killed together.”
Shamima is now in the sprawling al-Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria after managing to flee the fighting in one of the few remaining ISIS strongholds in the war-ravaged country and wants to return to Britain.
But she believes Amira Abase and Sharmeena Begum might have perished after choosing to stay for the last battle at Baghuz.
She told The Times: “I last saw my two friends in June but I heard from other women only two weeks ago that the two were still alive in Baghuz.
“But with all the recent bombing, I am not sure now whether they have survived.”
“They were strong. I respect their decision. They urged patience and endurance in the caliphate and chose to stay behind in Baghuz.
“They would be ashamed of me if they survived the bombing and battle to learn that I had left.
“They made their choice as single women. For their husbands were already dead. It was their own choice as women to stay.”