A week before Farzana Ameen disappeared from Bradford, England in October 2015, she flew to Pakistan, left her bedridden mother with relatives there, and came back. Then she boarded a one-way flight to Turkey with her husband Imran and their five children, including five-year-old Mohammed, and was never seen again. The Ameens are believed to have crossed into Syria, where authorities suspected they joined ISIS, which had declared a caliphate the year before. Imran's brother Rehan, 30, had made the trip four months earlier. None of the eight have ever returned.
According to a Wikipedia entry on the family, the Ameens were one of two Bradford families that disappeared into ISIL territory that year. They had no criminal record and didn't appear on any watchlists. Multiple relatives lived nearby: Imran's father next door, a cousin opposite. Their three youngest were students at St. Matthew's, the local Church of England primary school. Farzana wore no face veil, kept mostly English friends, and prayed five times a day.
Neighbors said the family became more religious after Imran's younger brother survived a 2007 kidnapping. Rehan, then 21, was beaten with bats by three men demanding £20,000. He escaped. Three days later one of them cornered him with a gun. After that, Rehan turned to religion. Imran did too. He stopped shaving, changed his wardrobe, and ran ads on Islamicmovements.com, a site with pages on Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban's Mullah Omar, and Osama bin Laden.
A week after the family flew to Turkey, Farzana phoned her brother in Pakistan and left a voicemail saying this was the right choice for her children.
More than a decade later, the Ameens have never reappeared. Police issued a fresh appeal in 2016 for them and the Dawoods, the other Bradford family that disappeared that year. No credible reports have placed any of them in the Syrian or Iraqi camps holding former ISIS recruits.
Previously:
- Turns out the 15-year-old girl Britain stripped citizenship from for becoming an ISIS bride was trafficked to Syria by a Canadian spy
- RIP Anna Campbell, a British woman who joined an all-woman Kurdish Protection Unit
- English anti-terror cops ask nursery school workers to watch 4 year olds for signs of radicalization
