Isis bride ‘a victim of trafficking’

LAWYERS for a woman who was stripped of her British citizenship after travelling to join the Islamic State group in Syria challenged the decision yesterday, arguing she was a victim of child trafficking.

Shamima Begum is one of hundreds of Europeans whose fate following the 2019 collapse of the Islamist extremists’ self-styled caliphate has proved a thorny issue for governments.

Begum, then 15, left her home in east London in 2015 with two school friends to travel to Syria, where she married an IS fighter and had three children, none of whom survived.

She was later “found” by British journalists, heavily pregnant in a Syrian camp in February 2019, and her apparent lack of remorse in initial interviews drew outrage. Dubbed an “IS bride”, she was stripped of her British citizenship, leaving her stranded and stateless in Syria’s Kurdish-run Roj camp.

Yesterday’s hearing at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission follows a Supreme Court decision last year to refuse her permission to enter the UK to fight her citizenship case against the Home Office, or interior ministry. Begum’s lawyer, Samantha Knights, told the court that “at its heart this case concerns a British child aged 15 who was influenced with her friends … by a determined and effective Isis propaganda machine”.

There was “overwhelming” evidence she had been “recruited, transported, transferred, harboured and received in Syria for the purposes of ‘sexual exploitation’ and ‘marriage’ to an adult male”. But she said the process by which the Home Office took the decision to remove Begum’s citizenship and failed to determine whether she was “a child victim of trafficking”.

Begum has since expressed remorse for her actions.