12 medical students escape to Turkey to join ISIS

Twelve medical students studying at the University of Medical Sciences and Technology (UMST), Khartoum, Sudan, have travelled to Turkey with the intention of crossing into Syria to join ISIS.

The university’s Dean of Students, Ahmed Babaker, told Reuters on Sunday that the students left without the knowledge of their families.

“Twelve students, nine male and three female, in the faculty of medicine left for Turkey last Friday, most of them on Turkish Airlines, without the knowledge of their families,” Babaker said.

“They were supposed to sit an exam last Friday and they tricked their families by saying they would study at their colleagues’ homes on Thursday.

"They left at dawn on Friday."

According to him, seven of them had British passports, two carried Canadian passports, one student had a U.S. passport while two held Sudanese passports.

He however revealed that Turkish authorities have arrested three of them at an unspecified airport.

It will be recalled that another group of UMST medical students had in March travelled to Turkey en route to Syria.

Both group of students are reportedly from well to do families, studied at UMST and lived most of their lives abroad.

Speculations are now that, UMST, founded by a Sudanese Islamist lawmaker, and may then be an ISI breeding ground.

A spokesperson for both the British embassy in Khartoum and Britain’s Foreign Office in London confirmed the seven students' movement.