United Kingdom: The banishment of a teenage ISIS bride
What does Britain owe to its teenage terrorists? asked The Economist. Shamima Begum, born and raised in east London, was just 15 in 2015 when she traveled to Syria to join ISIS and married a Dutch jihadist. Four years later, she turned up in a Syrian refugee camp, appearing “unrepentant” yet asking to come home. The government instead stripped Begum of her citizenship, arguing that because her parents hailed originally from Bangladesh she could potentially go there, but Bangladesh refused her. Now she’s 23, and her veil is gone, “replaced by a baseball cap and sunglasses that are more TikTok than terror state,” but Begum is still stuck in the camp and begging for a second chance. That has now been denied: Last week, an appeals court upheld her banishment. If this trend of “whipping away someone’s citizenship” seems medieval, that’s because it is. Britain revived it only after 9/11, to be used against terrorists, and “the consequences are ugly.” Because the U.K. can’t make anyone stateless, it banishes only those who hold additional citizenship. The effect is that for white English jihadis citizenship is an “inviolable right,” but for children of immigrants it is revocable. In taking such a position, the U.K. “has trampled its values.”
Begum might have been back home in London by now if only she’d cried for the cameras, said Martha Gill in the Evening Standard. When she resurfaced in 2019, the youngster reeked of “teenage ingratitude, entitlement, and irritation,” repeatedly failing to show remorse in interviews. She soon became “one of the most hated people in the U.K.,” and Britons ignored the fact that she was very likely a sex-trafficking victim. This is a girl, remember, who before age 20 bore three children, all of whom died in infancy in the brutal conditions of wartime Syria. Of course she has an attitude; she’s traumatized. Why can’t her fellow countrymen “grasp that someone brainwashed as a teenager by ISIS might actually act like a teenager brainwashed by ISIS”? “Thank God” the British people have more sense than to fall for that “victim” nonsense, said Allison Pearson in The Telegraph. The woman is a traitor, and 78 percent of Britons agree with the 2019 decision to strip her of her citizenship. If we’d allowed her back, she’d be the “poster girl for those who think they can give their allegiance to the enemies of Britain and then return to the country they betrayed.”
Traitor or not, trafficked or not, that should have been for the courts to decide, said The Times in an editorial. By refusing to repatriate her, Britain is “washing its hands of responsibility” to hold Begum accountable for her crimes. Plenty of other European countries took their jihadis back—even the Americans tried all 27 of their citizens who had joined ISIS. True, there were hundreds of Brits who went to the Middle East between 2012 and 2019, so our job is tougher. But it’s still our job. Syrian camps continue to hold some 60 British women and their kids. Unless we bring them home, these children “will be brutally schooled into becoming terrorists themselves.”