LONDON — British police said on Tuesday they were hunting for three sisters and their nine children whose family fear they may have traveled to Syria to join a relative believed to be involved in the fighting there. Khadija Dawood, Sugra Dawood and Zohra Dawood and their children, aged between three and 15, from Bradford, northern England, were reported missing five days ago. There are now concerns they may have tried to join a brother of the three sisters who is suspected to be fighting with the Daesh (the so-called IS) militants in Syria. “One of the possibilities is they traveled to Turkey to travel to Syria,” Balaal Khan, the lawyer acting on behalf of the women's husbands, said in a statement. “The suspicion, and main concern, is that the women have taken their children to Syria.” Naz Shah, the local member of parliament, told Sky News she had met the women's husbands and that they were shocked to have discovered their families were missing. “If they have gone to Syria then the alarm bells are really, really loud,” she said, saying work had to be done to understand why the women would have taken such action without their husbands' consent. British authorities estimate more than 700 Britons have traveled to Syria, with a significant proportion thought to have joined Daesh which has taken over vast areas of the country and neighboring Iraq. Families are among those to have traveled, and police said of those arrested on their return to Britain last year, 11 percent were women and 17 percent were under 20. “We are extremely concerned for the safety of the family,” said Assistant Chief Constable Russ Foster, of West Yorkshire Police. “Their families are gravely worried about them and want them home.” “The family are quite understandably distraught,” the family attorney, Balaal Hussain Khan, told the BBC. “They don't know what to do.” Khan said the fathers are appealing for information. “If there are any friends of the wives or even the children who might have known about this trip, where they are going or if there has been any contact with anyone other than the family members, we are quite keen on you contacting either the police, my firm or the family directly,” he said. Preliminary inquiries suggest at least 10 members of the family boarded a flight from a third country to Istanbul — a commonly used route into Syria. There are no details of an eight-year-old and a five-year-old member of the party boarding the same flight. The local West Yorkshire Police force has launched an investigation, saying they were working with foreign authorities. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: “We are in contact with West Yorkshire Police and Turkish authorities and our ready to provide consular assistance.” — Agencies
