Aqsa Mahmood

Aqsa Mahmood (May 11, 1994February 2019) was a citizen of the United Kingdom, from Glasgow, who stirred controversy in 2013 when she was one of the first UK women to voluntarily travel into ISIL territory in Syria, when she was 20 years old. to Pakistani immigrant parents; her father Muzaffar was the first Pakistani to play cricket for the Scottish cricket team. She attended Craigholme School for five terms before attending Shawlands Academy in Glasgow for a year. At the time she left the UK for Syria, she was taking a course in diagnostic radiography at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Mahmood's parents believe she was convinced to join ISIL by Adeel Ulhaq. They found out Mahmood was communicating with Ulhaq in May 2013. That summer, Mahmood ran away from home and told her family she wanted to marry Ulhaq, but her family convinced her to postpone the decision to marry and to return home. A month after she left Scotland, she reportedly married an ISIL fighter. She is known to have lived with her husband in an apartment in Raqqa, in an area known as "Little Britain" because so many British foreign fighters and their families lived there. Zahra and Salma Halane, sixteen-year-old twin sisters who had run away from their homes in England to join ISIL, lived nearby with their husbands. Mahmood is also believed to have held a senior role in the Al-Khansaa Brigade, ISIL's all-female morals police. Her blog mentioned Mauritian ISIL blogger Zafirr Golamaully, and he mentioned her on his blog. She published a guide on how to reach Syria, warning women that if they traveled to ISIL territory they would have to prepare for widowhood as their fighter husbands were likely to be killed. On Twitter, Mahmood said, "The reward you will receive after your 'migration' is very high. You will finally become the wife of a martyr, and you will be overcome by feelings that words cannot describe. There is no way to describe the feeling of sitting with the sisters waiting for news of which of you will have her husband martyred today." Her parents made a public appeal for her to return home in September, ten months after she left. In 2015, Mahmood's family challenged the allegation that she played a role in recruiting three teenage girls, the Bethnal Green trio, to follow her example. She may have had contact with Tooba Gondal prior to the latter's departure from Britain for Syria.

Early in 2015, Mahmood posted a photo online of herself, standing next to young children and holding the severed head of an executed Syrian man. told the UK House of Commons Home Affairs Committee that security officials were close to compiling enough evidence to charge Mahmood, if she returned to the UK, or to request extradition, if she tried to settle elsewhere. Muthana arrived in Syria in March 2014, joining his older brother who had gone there three months before him. During his trial, Ulhaq testified that he had considered going to Syria to bring Mahmood, whom he called his ex-girlfriend, home. Since his release from prison in 2018 he has been returned to prison twice for breaching the terms of his release.

In February 2019, The Mirror reported that Mahmood was believed to have died in the war zone.