UK Teen ISIS Bride: should she come home?

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You are a teenage girl in a British Muslim family. You go to school, and after that it’s homework and helping your Mum with her duties. Your family keep you safe because they know what boys will do with nubile girls given half a chance, and that would ruin you and dishonour the family.

Or you could run away and f*ck a hero!

Think carefully – hey, where are you going! Wait!

And so, on 17 February 2015, Shamima Begum and two of her school pals went to Syria to have husbands allotted to them, whom they would serve as the jihadis fought for what they saw as their noble religious cause; and who used this excuse to indulge in horrible violence and cruelty.

Aged only 15, Shamima went through a form of marriage with a Dutch convert to Islam, 23-year-old Yago Riedijk, who was later captured and as of last November was in a Kurdish detention centre, facing a six-year jail term for terrorism if and when he returns to the Netherlands. They had three children together, all of whom died in infancy.

Of the other two girls who accompanied Shamima, Kadiza Sultana reportedly died in a Russian airstrike on Raqqa, Syria; Amira Abase, together with another schoolfriend called Sharmeena Begum who had gone ahead of the trio, had been seen in Baghuz, Syria, but that town was obliterated in a US airstrike (18 March 2019) that killed many civilians.

It’s the tip of the iceberg. According to JAN Trust, in the 12 months to July 2015, 43 women and girls were seduced into leaving the UK for the Syrian warzone.

Now, we discover, Canada has been implicated in this people-processing. A man called Mohammed Al Rasheed, based in Turkey, was helping people like Shamima transit from the UK to ISIS in Syria but also passing their details to Canadian Intelligence. According to George Galloway, the just-published book that reveals this says that the then British Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, was told of this by Shamima’s lawyer five years ago but sat on the information.

What Javid did instead, responding to public anger at the allegedly treasonous and culpable association of this British female with the ISIS atrocities, was to deprive Shamima of her British citizenship on 19 February 2019.

The Government argued that under the British Nationality Act 1981 the children of foreign immigrants (Shamima’s parents came from Bangladesh) have less protection against such a deprivation but that Shamima would not thereby be made stateless (which would go against the UNHCR Convention of 1954.) The UK’s Home Office expert Dr Hoque referred to Bangladesh’s Citizenship Act, 1951:

This says that “a person born after the commencement of this Act shall be a citizen of Bangladesh by descent if his father or mother is a citizen of Bangladesh at the time of her birth”. It goes on to say that dual nationality is not permitted, so someone with another citizenship “ceases to be a citizen of Bangladesh” — but that proviso only applies to people over 21.

Dr Hoque said:

Until the age of 21, therefore, a Bangladeshi citizen continues to remain a citizen alongside being a foreign citizen.

For its part, Bangladesh refuses to accept her, or any militant.

So there she remains, stuck in limbo in Syria.

The Guardian newspaper is inclined to present Shamima as a victim of trafficking; Spiked’s Editor Tom Slater and writer Rakib Ehsan take the view that she was willing and aware of what she was doing.

Peter Hitchens reminds us that Shamima would have been rather more naive when she left the UK at age 15 and that it is ‘cruel’ to leave her stateless and abandoned; rather, we should bring her to the UK to face justice. Speaking on GB News, he emphasised the importance of holding to law and institutions, especially in cases where feelings run high; we can’t give in to the mob.