One of the last conversations Elgizouli had with her son face to face served to intensify her fears about the path he had embarked upon. She had recently met a friend of his from the mosque, a young Syrian man in robes with a shaven head and a long beard, and had taken a dislike to him. Two months later, she says, “I found Shafee crying.” She asked him what had happened and he drew closer to her. He said: “You know the boy you don’t like, Mum? He died, he passed away.”

"Where?" she asked.

“In Syria.”

Despite this shock, Elsheikh was encouraging his younger brother, Mahmoud, to come to the mosque with him. As a single mother, Elgizouli was unable to go inside with them to hear the preaching for herself or try to challenge what was being taught. She began to see the same signs of early radicalisation in the teenage Mahmoud that she had witnessed only months before in his older brother.

At her wits’ end, Elgizouli travelled to Sudan to visit her family. She wanted advice about how to handle her two boys back home. “I have a big family in Sudan, all is communist,” she says. “They have a good brain.” It felt good to be among her own people, but the night before she was due to fly back to London, she talked to Elsheikh on Skype and became worried about his whereabouts. “I say, 'I need to see my home, see you at home,'” she says. He managed to evade the request, but she told him: “Put some petrol in the car, you have to be in the airport because my flight and everything.” She says he replied: “OK, Mummy, bye bye.”

When she walked through the arrivals gate at the airport searching for her son’s face in the crowd, she felt the panic building inside her. “I am looking out for Shafee, I find Mahmoud only,” she says. “When I looked at him, something hurt me here,” she goes on, pointing to her heart, “because he’s wearing that Islamic robe. I said, ‘What is this, Mahmoud?’ He said, ‘Now I am a Muslim.’”

Mahmoud, then 17, was tight-lipped about the whereabouts of his brother, but then their neighbour gave Elgizouli the dreaded news that she had seen him getting into a taxi with a travel bag days before. It was April 2012, and her worst nightmare had come true. Her son had run away to Syria to wage jihad.

Elgizouli was distraught, and terrified that she was losing Mahmoud too. “I called my husband in Sudan, told him, ‘I want to bring Mahmoud to Sudan, I am scared here,’” she says. “I ask him many times, 'I need you to help me because I am a single mother.' I told him, 'I need help, I can’t go to the mosque with them. If I go with a man I can’t enter. I need to go inside, I need to see what the imam say to my son. Please help me.'”

