Lawyer: Britain plans to strip IS teen of her citizenship

LONDON — Shamima Begum, a London teenager who left Britain four years ago to join the Islamic State group, is to be stripped of her U.K. citizenship by the government, her family’s lawyer said Tuesday.

Attorney Tasnime Akunjee tweeted that the family is “very disappointed with the Home Office’s intention to have an order made depriving Shamima of her citizenship.”

He said the family is “considering all legal avenues to challenge this decision.”

ITV News reported that the family had received a letter from the Home Office, which oversees immigration, saying that the order revoking Begum’s British citizenship had been made, but that she could appeal the decision. Begum left London with two friends in 2015, when she was 15, and traveled to Syria. Now 19 and living in a refugee camp, she says she has given birth to a baby and wants to come home. The teenager said she had married an IS fighter, had lost two children through malnutrition and disease, and wanted her newly born baby boy to grow up in Britain. In a series of interviews with British media, she criticized some aspects of the Islamic State group and its self-proclaimed caliphate, but said she does not regret going there. She said she had been “OK with” beheadings carried out by Islamic State adherents because she believed it was allowed under Islamic law. “I think a lot of people should have sympathy towards me for everything I’ve been through,” she told Sky News. “I just was hoping that maybe ... for the sake of me and my child, they let me come back.”