LONDON (AFP) – Lawyers for a woman who was stripped of her British citizenship after traveling to join the Daesh group in Syria challenged the decision on Monday, arguing she was a victim of child trafficking.
Shamima Begum is one of hundreds of Europeans whose fate following the 2019 collapse of the terrorists’ self-styled 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 a Daesh terrorists and had three children, none of whom survived.
She was later “found” by British journalists, heavily pregnant in a Syrian camp in February 2019 — and her apparent lack of remorse in initial interviews drew outrage.
Dubbed a “Daesh bride,” she was stripped 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 enter the UK to fight her citizenship case against the Home Office, or interior ministry.
Begum’s lawyer, Samantha Knights, told the court that “at its heart this case concerns a British child aged 15 who was... influenced... with her friends... by a determined and effective Daesh propaganda machine.”
There was “overwhelming” evidence she had been “recruited, transported, transferred, harbored and received in Syria for the purposes of ‘sexual exploitation’ and ‘marriage’ to an adult male.”
But she said the process by which the Home Office took the decision to remove Begum’s citizenship was “extraordinary” and “over hasty” and failed to investigate and determine whether she was “a child victim of trafficking.”
A book published earlier this year by journalist Richard Kerbaj alleged that Begum, now 23, and her friends were taken into Syria by a man who was leaking information to the Canadian security services.
Mohammed al-Rashed is alleged to have been in charge of the Turkish side of an extensive Daesh people smuggling network.