The parents of the Bethnal Green girls – as we used to call them before two were killed, leaving only Shamima Begum as the media’s jihadi bridezilla – knew from the start that something was off.
After the girls ran away from their homes in east London in February 2015 and turned up in Syria with the Islamic State, the authorities dissembled at every turn. The school, the police, the security forces who had been monitoring the girls’ communications with IS recruiters – every institution responsible with their protection put forward tales to explain how three working-class girls aged just 15 and 16 had made their way out of Britain and navigated their way across multiple national borders to the most dangerous war zone on the planet.
