Teenager bride fighting for IS groomed by group founded by Bangladesh war criminal: Report

A bride still in her teens, who groomed three of her school friends to fight for the Islamic State with her in Syria, had been radicalised into a jihadi at women’s charity run by one of Britain’s biggest mosque, reports The Daily Mail.

And it so happens there is an embedded Bangladeshi angle to the episode as well.

Sharmeena Begum had fled her home in East London to join the IS militants in Syria last December at the age of 15, making her one of the youngest British teenagers to do so.

In just about three months, three other teenagers – Amira Abase, 16, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Shamima Begum, 15 – said to be Sharmeena’s closest friends in school, also fled to Syria.

Their disappearance led to the launch of an international search for them.

All the girls were students at the Bethnal Green Academy in Tower Hamlets, East London. Islamic leaders and their relative claimed the Internet had played a crucial role in their radicalisation.

But “it is now being claimed” that Sharmeena had been first indoctrinated into radical thinking at the East London Mosque, Whitechapel, allegedly by a women’s group known as the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), says the report by Omar Wahid.

The IFE previously attracted controversy because of one of its founders, Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin.

He is a former leader of the Al-Badr killing squad who has been sentenced to death for war crimes committed during Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971.

He and Ashrafuzzaman Khan, based in the US, were sentenced in absentia for involvment in the abduction and murders of 18 people – nine Dhaka University teachers, six journalists and three physicians – in December 1971.

The relatives of the teenager blame individuals in the IFE’s women’s wing, a smaller rump called the Sisters Forum or Muslimaat, for instigating her travel to Syria after her mother’s death.

The IFE, has, however, denied the allegation. 

The Mail on Sunday learnt:

Sharmeena had been egged on to go to go to Syria by the Sisters Forum after her mother died of cancer with the promise that she would be reunited with her mother in heaven if she died fighting for the IS.

Shamreena, in turn, had persuaded her three friends to join meetings in the East London mosque. The mosque authorities, however, denied any links with Islamic extremists.

She had borrowed money from her grandmother to pay for her plane fare and convinced her grandfather to part with her passport.

She bought a plane ticket to Turkey and proceeded to Syria from there.

Sharmeena called her family two months back to say she had married a Syrian IS fighter. She is now sixteen.

Her father, Mohammed Nizam Uddin, 38, told the police her daughter’s attitude had undergone a change after her mother died at the age of 33.

A teenager who wanted to become a doctor turned reclusive and started going to the East London Mosque and began wearing Islamic clothes such as the hijab. Her father had imagined it was her way of coping with the loss.

He said she would often ask him to drop her there and later pick her up.

He, however, did not blame the mosque for his daughter’s changing attitudes and ultimate departure.

But Shamreen’s step-uncle Baki Miah, 35, said: “They told her things like, if she goes and dies in Syria, she would go to paradise, where she would meet her mother.

“I am 500 per cent sure that she was groomed at the East London Mosque. She was spending most of her time in the mosque, after school and all the time, she was spending in the mosque,” the report quoted him as saying.