Shamima Begum: Who is the young woman seeking to have her British citizenship restored?

Mother who fled Britain as a schoolgirl to join terrorist militants in Syria has since appealed for forgiveness and argued she has been left ‘stateless’

Shamima Begum is set to begin her appeal against the decision to revoke her British citizenship on national security grounds.

A Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) hearing to consider her case opens on Monday at Field House tribunal centre in London and is expected to last for five days.

Ms Begum, now 23, was raised in east London by parents of Bangladeshi origin and attended Bethnal Green Academy but, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl, fled for Syria via Turkey in February 2015 alongside two friends – Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase – in order to join the Isis terrorist faction then engaged in regular attacks on European capitals and seizing territory in the Middle East.

British counter-terrorism police launched an international manhunt to find the trio but to no avail.

Ms Begum lived with the Islamist extremists for more than three years, marrying Dutch convert Yago Riedijk 10 days after arriving in Syria, a convicted terrorist with whom she had at least three children, two of whom died in infancy of malnutrition.

Riedijk, now held in a Syrian detention centre but originally from Arnhem, has since described their “beautiful” life together and happy times baking cakes, even telling filmmaker Alan Duncan of his hope that they might “start a family again” in the Netherlands.

Driven from Raqqa in October 2017 when US-backed fighters regained control of the city, Ms Begum was subsequently found on 13 February 2019 by Anthony Lloyd, war correspondent to The Times.

She was nine months pregnant with a baby boy at the time and living at the al-Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria, at which point her UK passport was withdrawn by then-home secretary Sajid Javid on the basis that she continued to pose a threat to Britain and was in a position to seek alternative citizenship in Bangladesh because of her parents’ heritage.

“My number one job is to do whatever I can to keep this country safe,” Mr Javid said, explaining his decision.

UK law allows the government to remove citizenship if they can show the person concerned behaved “in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK” and when there is “reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the UK, to become a national of such a country or territory.”

Ms Begum denied any involvement in the Islamist group’s terror campaign and has attempted to challenge the Home Office’s decision since April 2019 on the basis that it risks leaving her “stateless” and potentially exposed to the risk of death or inhuman and degrading treatment.

On 16 July 2020, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that “the only way in which she can have a fair and effective appeal is to be permitted to come into the United Kingdom to pursue her appeal”.

On reaching that decision, Lord Flaux said: “Fairness and justice must, on the facts of this case, outweigh the national security concerns, so that the leave to enter appeals should be allowed.”

Ms Begum and the Home Office were then invited to present their arguments to the Supreme Court, the UK’s highest legal authority, while the applicant was then living at another camp, al-Roj, in northeastern Syria in conditions her lawyers’ described as “dire”.

Ms Begum said she was “very happy” but “very nervous” about the prospect of returning to Britain, expressing concern “about what will happen to her and how people will look at her there”.

That prospect failed to come to pass, however, as the Supreme Court’s panel of five justices, led by Lord Reed, ruled on 26 February 2021 that she would not be allowed leave to enter the UK to pursue her appeal after all.

During an interview on ITV’s Good Morning Britain on 15 September 2021, Ms Begum appealed for forgiveness from the British people and said she wanted to be brought back to the UK to face charges, adding in a direct appeal to then-prime minister Boris Johnson that she could be “an asset” in the fight against terror.

She insisted she had been “groomed” as a “dumb kid” and radicalised by propaganda videos seen online.

Walking back remarks previously made to a BBC journalist about the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017 when she said that Isis considered the killings “justified” in light of the airstrikes being carried out against them, she said: “I do not believe that one evil justifies another evil. I don’t think that women and children should be killed for other people’s motives and for other people’s agendas.”

Tasnime Akunjee, a lawyer for the Begum family, said in a statement ahead of Monday’s hearing: “Shamima Begum will have a hearing in the SIAC court, where one of the main arguments will be that when former home secretary Sajid Javid stripped Shamima Begum of her citizenship leaving her in Syria, he did not consider that she was a victim of trafficking.

“The UK has international obligations as to how we view a trafficked person and what culpability we prescribed to them for their actions.”

That argument relates to the role played in her decision to flee by Mohammed al-Rasheed, an Isis fixer who is alleged by the BBC and The Times to have been a double agent also working for the Canadian government and who is thought to have met the girls in Turkey before taking them on to Syria in 2015.

As for what happened to Ms Begum’s companions, Ms Sultana was reportedly killed in a Russian air raid while Ms Abase is still missing, although it has been claimed that she is still in Syria.

Additional reporting by agencies