Jihadi bride: Sharmeena Begum is thought to be in the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa . To her adoring father, she was just like any other 15-year-old. Sharmeena Begum loved shopping at Forever 21, listening to Rihanna and watching EastEnders. A keen pupil, she would chatter excitedly to her father about her dreams of becoming a doctor. And of course, like most of her schoolmates, she was utterly obsessed with her mobile. Like most fathers, Mohammad Uddin saw nothing sinister in her constant tapping away on her iPhone. He assumed she was using Twitter and the instant messaging service WhatsApp simply to chat with her friends. Only now does he know the horrifying truth – that Sharmeena was being groomed through the internet by shadowy IS extremists. The 38-year-old father discovered too late what was going on under his nose. His daughter is now living in the IS stronghold of Raqqa, in Syria, as a jihadi bride – and has told him she will never return. Last night Mr Uddin told of his belief that sinister IS recruiters had taken advantage of Twitter and WhatsApp to corrupt his daughter. She had told him she was too sick to go to school the day before she fled, last December 6. But she met up with her best friends – Kadiza Sultana, 16, Shamima Begum, 15, and Amira Abase, 15 – at the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London, that evening. Sharmeena bought an iPhone 5S and some new clothes, apparently using £500 she persuaded her grandmother to hand over a few weeks earlier. The four girls had been inseparable at Bethnal Green Academy, a school rated outstanding by Ofsted. They were so close that Sharmeena invited the other three to her father’s wedding when he married for a second time in September. Mr Uddin, a waiter at a central London restaurant, urged police to speak to the other teenagers after his daughter vanished, and even suggested they might have considered running away with her. ‘I said [to officers], “Keep an eye on the three girls, maybe they’ll give you a clue.” Shamima, Kadiza, and Amira were her closest friends,’ he said. ‘I was pretty sure when my daughter went missing that the four girls would have gone together. And when I realised [they hadn’t] I was surprised. ‘I went to Bethnal Green Academy two days later, on the Monday, and I spoke to the deputy headmistress and I asked to speak to the three girls. Scroll down for videos . Mohammad Uddin with pictures of his teenage daughter. He said he believes she was targeted by extremists . ‘She told me “The police are speaking to them so you can’t”.’ Sharmeena was born to Bangladeshi parents in Tower Hamlets, east London, in 1999. She was largely brought up by her mother Shahnaz Begum until 2007, when her father moved to Britain. Mrs Begum was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2013 and told she had only six months left to live. She kept this secret from her daughter for as long as possible. Recalling the moment their GP broke the news to Sharmeena, Mr Uddin said: ‘It was two months before her mother died. ‘She was crying loads, but I told her: “Everyone is going to die. Today it’s your mum, tomorrow it could be me. We need to be patient”.’ Growing up in a modest two-bedroom council flat in Bethnal Green just a stone’s throw from the trendy bars and coffee shops of Shoreditch, Sharmeena harboured ambitions to become a doctor or a teacher and achieved top grades in English, her favourite subject. She was an ordinary teenager who loved shopping for clothes and make-up. But after her mother died in January last year, aged just 33, she changed and began taking an intense interest in Islam, spending most of her free time praying in her room. Family album: Sharmeena pictured as a young child . Mr Uddin said: ‘I thought this was normal because she lost the closest person to her, and she’s an only child. Before then she wasn’t very religious. She wouldn’t go to the mosque and she would wear English dress. ‘But then she changed her dressing style and wore a scarf and started praying five times a day. ‘Sometimes she would go to the East London Mosque for prayers.’ Her father was not worried about this change in her behaviour, and even took his daughter to Mecca for the hajj pilgrimage – an Islamic ritual devout Muslims are expected to perform at least once. Sharmeena set her alarm to wake herself up early to pray, and she destroyed old pictures of herself, saying women should not be photographed. She stopped listening to Western music and spent more and more time watching the news. It is now apparent that she was preparing to travel to Syria to join IS, although her contacts with jihadists are impossible to trace because she has deleted her social media accounts. Shortly before fleeing to Turkey, she asked her father to pay for an online order from her favourite shop, Forever 21, because she needed some new clothes for the ‘cold weather’. The package arrived two days after she had run away. Her father thinks she was groomed to go to Syria by two young women, who are believed to have taken her to the airport and ensured she got on the flight to Turkey. Mr Uddin could not believe that his daughter had left Britain because she was not even allowed to travel the one mile down the road from her home to Whitechapel by herself. He said: ‘When the police came, I was ringing my daughter continuously, but it kept going to voicemail in a different language. The 15-year-old is believed to be in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa with classmates Amira Abase, Kadiza Sultana and Shamima Begum (above) ‘I asked the officers what the language was – two or three hours later they told me she was in Turkey. ‘I didn’t know why she had gone to Turkey. I thought she’s got no relatives or friends there – there was nobody in Turkey, so how come she went there? I asked the police “How can she fly without any parent or guardian?” They told me the airline’s rules say a 14-year-old can fly by herself.’ Mr Uddin does not blame the police for his daughter running away but he believes more could have been done when she was in Turkey and making her way to the Syrian border. He said: ‘She didn’t make it to the Islamic State the same day, she was in Turkey for a few days. ‘I saw from my phone records that she was still making calls in Turkey to a Turkish mobile. So I was a bit upset because I gave police all this information. ‘She was calling two or three people over four or five days. Maybe they could have found her in Turkey but they didn’t.’ Video footage showing the three British schoolgirls an hour before they crossed into Syria to join Islamic State emerged last night. It was filmed on a hidden camera by a double agent said to work for the Canadian intelligence agency. He can be heard giving the girls fake Syrian passports and counting their bags in the boot of a car before telling them to get in the vehicle. ‘Yalla, sis,’ he says, meaning ‘Let’s go, sisters.’ Then he points towards Syria and says with a laugh: ‘It’s nice.’ He tells them it will take only an hour to reach to reach the border. The girls’ bags were put in the car by a second man. A woman’s voice can be heard, too, but her face isn’t shown on the 73-second video. The agent, a Syrian, is said by Turkey to be a ‘local asset’ who works for Canada on a freelance basis. He was picked up by Turkish officials just over a week ago and is in custody. Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the man was ‘someone who worked in the intelligence services of a country in the US-coalition [against IS]. ‘I told this to the British foreign secretary and he replied, “As usual.” ’ But a senior Canadian government official said the suspect was ‘not a Canadian citizen’ and ‘not employed by’ its spy agency. Film’s start: The girls meet the ‘agent’, who gives them documents - fake Syrian passports . Orders: They hand over their bags, which are placed in a car boot after arriving from Turkey . On camera: The so-called double agent (left), and the second man .
Sharmeena Begum has been named as the first British schoolgirl in Syria . She left home in December ahead of three classmates from Bethnal Green . Her father, Mohammad Udin, says she was targeted by Islamic extremists . He claims they contacted her through her iPhone after her mother's death .