OTTAWA (Dispatches) -- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood behind Canada’s top civilian intelligence agency in response to a revelation that one of its contractors helped traffic three British teenage girls to Daesh extremists seven years ago.
A new book by UK-based writer Richard Kerbaj — The Secret History of the Five Eyes — was published on Thursday. It claims that an informant for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) smuggled Shamima Begum, 15 at the time, and her school friends Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase — 16 and 15 at the time — into northern Syria, and that the informant told his Canadian handlers.
The book goes on to claim that CSIS later approached the counter-terrorism branch of London’s Metropolitan Police — which was investigating the disappearance of the teenagers — and asked that the agency not become the focus of attention.
“The fight against terrorism requires our intelligence services to continue to be flexible and to be creative in their approaches,” Trudeau said following the swearing-in of two cabinet ministers on Thursday.
On Tuesday, new reports suggested Scotland Yard was informed that Begum and her two friends were trafficked into Syria by a smuggler who was a double agent working both for Daesh and Canadian intelligence.
But instead of using that intelligence to find Begum and her friends, the reports suggest British officials helped Canada cover up its role.
Canada recruited Muhammad al-Rashed, an alleged human trafficker, when he reportedly applied for asylum at the Canadian embassy in Jordan, and he is believed to have facilitated the journeys of dozens more British nationals into Daesh-controlled Syria.
British academic Rizwaan Sabir said the new reports raised more questions than answers for the British media and security services in how they treated Begum and her family.
“This whole saga illustrates how disposable Muslim lives are to intelligence agencies given these vulnerable schoolgirls were proactively trafficked into a warzone to be used as bait to secure intelligence data on others,” Sabir, an assistant professor specializing in counterterrorism at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, told Middle East Eye.
Turkish outlets first reported claims in 2015 that Rashed worked with Canada’s intelligence services after he was arrested by Ankara, but the reports received little coverage in the UK despite the matter being raised by Turkey’s foreign minister.
“Had this information been reported and investigated by the media more thoroughly when the story broke, it is highly likely that it would have weakened the UK government’s ability to deprive Shamima Begum of her citizenship and weakened their chances of introducing new laws to deprive others of their citizenship too,” said Sabir.
“The outcomes of failing to report or investigate this issue cannot be underestimated.”
Begum went to Syria in 2015, at the height of Daesh’s control of large areas of Syria and Iraq, when she was 15 years old, with Kadiza and Amira.
Years later, journalists tracked down the East Londoner, who was then pregnant, in a camp for families suspected of associations with Daesh in northern Syria.
But Begum remains stranded and stateless in the Kurdish-controlled detention camp after former Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped her of her British citizenship in 2019.
Begum’s lawyers and family have long argued that she was groomed and trafficked to Syria. Critics have also said the media has demonized her since she was found in northern Syria.
Fatima Rajina, a researcher at the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montford University in Leicester, who has written extensively on the media representation of Begum, believes these reports are too little too late.
“There are so many other questions to consider here: Did Javid, the then-Home Secretary, know about this? If so, was this used as a premise to inject a two-tier citizenship into law? Why was her citizenship stripped and she left stranded in a refugee camp?” Rajina asked.
“This important detail of a smuggler working for Canadian intelligence could have shaped the framing of Begum in a different way that did not dehumanize her since being deprived of her British citizenship.
“Why did the media not investigate these claims when they first came out in 2015, and when it was investigated? Why was it made public by the Times years later, whilst simultaneously promoting a new book by a [former] Times journalist, when this information could have helped in potentially bringing Shamima home instead of making her stateless?