US plans to send British jihadists to Guantanamo
Washington fed up with UK’S soft approach to dealing with returning terrorists
THE United States is planning to send British Isil fighters to Guantánamo Bay amid frustration at the UK’S failure to take responsibility for its homegrown terrorists, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
Senior US officials believe Guantánamo can house more than 50 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighters, including the two surviving British members of the so-called “Beatles” terrorist cell that executed Western hostages.
It has emerged that the vast majority of Islamist fighters returning to the UK from Syria have been placed on “secretive” government rehabilitation schemes rather than prosecuted. Officials figures show only one in 10 jihadists have been prosecuted.
The row over the treatment of returning jihadists erupted yesterday after it emerged that a schoolgirl who joined Isil in 2015 is now languishing in a refugee camp and pleading to come back to the UK.
The Home Office minister in charge of security declined Shamima Begum’s plea to be rescued, insisting that her “actions have consequences”.
Other senior sources suggested Ms Begum could be effectively barred from coming home and face prosecution in Turkey or Iraq instead.
Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said last night that he would use all available powers to prevent Ms Begum coming back to Britain.
Ms Begum, now aged 19 and nine months pregnant with her third child, fled to Syria with two friends from the same school in east London when aged just 15.
In an interview in the camp, she showed no remorse, telling The Times
“I don’t regret coming here”, while explaining that the sight of a severed head of a captured fighter dumped in a bin “didn’t faze me at all”. But she also spoke of her despair after her two other children died of illness and malnutrition. “I just couldn’t take it. Now all I want to do is come home to Britain,” said Ms Begum.
Yesterday Ms Begum’s family spoke to her on the phone for the first time in two years and appealed for “compassion and understanding”, while her lawyer said she should be treated as a victim.
Her family said they had hoped she would be able to return as long as the Government was satisfied “she had turned her back on their ideology”.
Mohammed Rehman, her brotherin-law, said: “She’s lost two children and put us all through a lot of heartache.
“She’s also gone through a very difficult time herself. At one stage we thought she was dead.
“I can understand why people in this country are angry and don’t want her back. What she’s done doesn’t portray Islam in a good light. But she was only 15 when she went to Syria.”
The father of another of the schoolgirls who travelled with Ms Begum to Syria also urged the British Government to retrieve his daughter.
Abase Hussen, the father of Amira Abase, said his daughter needed to be re-educated, not punished.
Mr Hussen said of his daughter, who is thought to still be in Isil-held territory: “They were just teenagers when they left. They should be allowed to learn from their mistakes.” Despite
According to her older sister Sahima, Shamima Begum was like any other 15-year-old girl, with the same hobbies, worries and infatuations that preoccupy the minds of most British teens. “She was into normal teenage things,” Sahima said. “She used to watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
But Shamima’s young mind was filled with much more than the affairs of Hollywood’s most famous family.
Four months before she was due to sit her GCSES, Shamima – the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, by all accounts a “sensible girl” and a “talented and dynamic” student at the high-flying Bethnal Green Academy – was secretly planning to leave her family and the only home she had ever known in London’s East End to travel to Syria to become a jihadi bride.
Two of her school friends, Kadiza Sultana, then 16, and Amira Abase, 15, planned to accompany her, with the girls aiming to join another friend, Sharmeena Begum (no relation of Shamima), who had successfully travelled to Syria the year before. In an embarrassment for Scotland Yard, police pulled a fifth girl from the group off the same flight Sharmeena was on without spotting her. Two months later, it was the turn of the remaining three to make their escape.
When CCTV footage emerged of three girls wearing hooded winter coats and thick-rimmed glasses, strolling through Gatwick Airport with smiles on their faces, they appeared so calm and casual they looked as if they might be going on a school trip, not about to board a one-way flight to the most dangerous corner of the world.
Their secret plan to leave Britain had been formulated and executed with meticulous precision. The girls stole jewellery from family members which they sold to cobble together the money for flights. They bought their tickets from a local travel agent, making sure there was money left over. They had to make sure there was something left to pay the men who would smuggle them over the border into the Syrian war zone where Isil was carving out its caliphate.
On the morning of Feb 17 2015, Shamima, Kadiza and Amira told their families they were going out for the day. Instead, they packed a small bag of hand luggage each and headed to Gatwick, where they would board a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul.
Under the noses of the counterterrorism police who had spoken to them two months earlier after their friend Sharmeena fled to Syria, the girls began their journey.
Four years later, one of them, Kadiza, is known to have been killed in a Russian air strike. Shamima, now 19, is alive and preparing to give birth to her third child (her first two died in infancy) in a refugee camp in northern Syria, having escaped Isil’s last stronghold. Amira and Sharmeena were last seen alive in June in the remaining pocket of Isil-held territory.
Shamima has lost two babies, her fighter husband is in captivity, and though she says she doesn’t regret coming to Syria, she has abandoned Isil at the 11th hour in an attempt to protect herself and her unborn child. For four years she has lived the life of a jihadi bride, witnessing the casual brutality of the regime on a daily basis. Now, she wants the ordeal to be over. She wants to return home to Britain.
Four years ago, almost to the day, the girls arrived in Istanbul and took a bus to the southern town of Gaziantep, close to the Syrian border. CCTV footage taken from a bus station showed them waiting with their bags.
Another video, filmed by a smuggler called Mohammed Rashid (an Isil double agent who reportedly passed intelligence to the British and Canadian governments), showed them clad in long black tunics trudging through snow and clambering into a car.
‘I just want to come home to have my child. I’ll do anything just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child’
Rashid gave them Syrian passports and tested codenames they had apparently been given. “Who is Um Ahmed?” he asked, before saying they would be in Syria in “one hour”.
They were taken to an illegal crossing point known as Abu Zella, north of Tal Abyad, where they were handed to a Saudi jihadist known as Abu Mohareb al-jazrawi. He was part of an Isil cell charged with helping transport would-be foreign jihadists into Raqqa. They stayed at a safe house for a day or two before another Isil smuggler, calling himself Abu Fahad, transferred them to Raqqa.
The girls spent their first days in Isil’s caliphate under lock and key in an apartment. They were put in the care of a female handler known as Um Laith – “Mother of the Lion” – tasked with “purifying their Western minds”.
In their first weeks the girls were not trusted by Raqqa’s Isil rulers, and were forbidden to leave their apartment without their chaperone.
Speaking to The Times from the camp where she is now awaiting the birth of her baby, Shamima recalled asking to be taken to the maqar – the female-only communal lodging for unmarried or widowed women where they believed their friend was living. “We kept asking his wife ‘why are we here?’ We want to see our friend. She didn’t say anything... Afterwards we found out it was because they suspected we were spies.”
All three were quickly married off. Kadiza is said to have wed a western Isil fighter of Somali heritage, but after he died in battle she decided to try to return to the UK. Shortly after, in May 2016, she was reported killed in a Russian air strike, aged 17.
Amira married an 18-year-old Australian jihadist, Abdullah Elmir, in July 2016. Elmir, described in Australian media as the “Ginger Jihadi”, was later reported by intelligence agencies to have died in coalition air strikes.
Shamima, meanwhile, married a Dutchman who had converted to Islam. For a while, she says, life was “normal”. She didn’t witness any executions, but she did see “a beheaded head in the bin”, she told a journalist calmly from the camp.
“Yeah, it didn’t phase me at all.” The young woman who can be heard talking on the recording is composed and unemotional. She is asked if it was hard losing two children.
“It came as a shock,” she replies. “It just came out of nowhere, it was so hard.” It’s why she is “really overprotective of this baby”, she says. “I’m scared that this baby is going to get sick in this camp, that’s why I really want to get back to Britain because I know it will be taken care of, like healthwise at least.”
She says of her school friend Kadiza: “Her house was bombed because underground there was some secret stuff going on and a spy had… they figured out that something was going on so her house got bombed.”
Abase Hussen, father of Amira, who was last seen in June, said he hoped his daughter was still alive. “She could always make us laugh,” he said.
“That’s how I want to think of her, not what happened after.”
Mr Hussen has said before that he could not understand his daughter’s descent into radicalisation. After she travelled to Syria, video emerged of Mr Hussen beside a burning US flag at a rally organised by the hate preacher Anjem Choudary. In 2015, Amira spoke to an undercover reporter from a Sunday newspaper after 30 Britons were shot dead by an Isil jihadist in Tunisia, mocking the victims.
Last summer her mother, Fetia Hussen, said she had lost contact and feared she had died, but Shamima has confirmed that she was seen alive last June, along with Sharmeena Begum.
On Wednesday night, Shamima’s sister Renu pleaded with the Government to allow her to come home. “She’s pregnant and vulnerable, and it’s important we get her out of al-hol camp and home as soon as possible,” she said. “We hope the British Government will help us bring her home to us where she belongs.”
The father of Sharmeena Begum told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that his family had been left distraught by her decision to travel to join Isil.
Mohammad Nizam Uddin said he had been unable to reconcile himself to her disappearance. The 42-year-old told The Telegraph: “We do not know where she is. As a father I urge the British Government to let these girls back into the country. When they went to Syria they were not mature and they had been radicalised.”
They travelled out to Syria together, but as Isil loses its remaining grip on the region, just one of the girls from Bethnal Green lives in relative safety.
“The caliphate is over,” says Shamima. “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they deserved victory.”
Her friends would be “ashamed” of her if they are alive and have learnt that she has fled. “They made their choice as single women. For their husbands were already dead. It was their own choice as women to stay.”
Now, she says, her priority is her baby. “I know what everyone at home thinks of me as I have read all that was written about me online. But I just want to come home to have my child. I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child.”