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 (SIAC) 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 was “extraordinary” and “over hasty” and failed to determine whether she was “a child victim of trafficking”.
A book published earlier this year by journalist Richard Kerbaj alleged that Begum, now 23, and her friends were taken into Syria by a Syrian man who was leaking information to the Canadian security services.
Mohammed Al-rashed is alleged to have been in charge of the Turkish side of an IS people smuggling network.
Despite her initial comments, Begum has since expressed remorse for her actions and sympathy for IS victims. In a documentary last year, she said that on arrival in Syria she quickly realised IS were “trapping people” to boost the caliphate’s numbers and “look good for the (propaganda) videos”. Some 900 people are estimated to have travelled from Britain to Syria and Iraq to join IS. Of those, around 150 are believed to have been stripped of their citizenship.
Human rights group Reprieve said there were 20-25 British families, including 36 children, still in camps in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria, where suspected relatives of IS fighters have been held. Last month, Berlin said it had repatriated 76 minors and 26 women of German families in jihadist prison camps in Syria.