LONDON, Nov 21 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A woman who lost her British citizenship after joining the Daesh group in Syria will on Monday have her case reviewed, with her lawyers arguing that she was a “victim of trafficking”.
Shamima Begum is one of hundreds of Europeans whose fate following the 2019 collapse of the so-called Daesh 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. Dubbed an “IS bride”, she was stripped by the UK of her British citizenship, leaving her stranded and stateless in Syria’s Kurdish-run Roj camp.
Monday’s hearing at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) follows a Supreme Court decision last year to refuse her permission to come to the UK to fight her citizenship case against the Home Office.
Tasnime Akunjee, the Begum family lawyer, said the hearing would be centred around whether she was “considered a victim of trafficking — notably whether the then home secretary (Sajid Javid) turned his mind to those issues when making the decision to strip her of citizenship”.
Some 900 people are estimated to have travelled from Britain to Syria and Iraq to join the Daesh group. Of those, around 150 are believed to have been stripped of their citizenship.
Human rights group Reprieve said there were currently 20-25 British families, including 36 children, still in camps in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria, where suspected relatives of Daesh fighters have been held.
Other European nations have also been grappling with how to handle the return of their own nationals.
Last month, Germany said it had settled “almost all known cases” of German families in jihadist prison camps in Syria, claiming to have repatriated 76 minors as well as 26 women.
According to Belgium’s federal prosecutor’s office, in mid-2022 there remained “a few women and a few children” in the Syrian camps.
Meanwhile, France has repatriated 31 women and 75 children in two operations. Some 175 French children and 69 women are believed to still be in the camps. — NNN-AGENCIES
