A pregnant British teenager who fled to Syria with two schoolfriends to marry an Islamic State fighter should be “given a chance” and allowed to come home, a former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6 has said.
Describing Shamima Begum as “a 15-year-old who went badly off the rails”, Richard Barrett said British society should be strong enough to reabsorb her, despite her lack of contrition. By contrast, he said the immediate reaction of the British government “has been a complete lack of concern for her plight”.
Begum fled her home in Bethnal Green, east London, with two schoolfriends to join Isis fighters in Syria in 2015. Interviewed this week in a refugee camp in the north of the country after fleeing Isis’s last stronghold, she told the Times that she was nine months pregnant and had fled the fighting after her two other children had died. “I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child,” she said.
She did not regret going to Syria, she told the newspaper, and expressed support for the murder of journalists, whom she said had been “a security threat for the caliphate”. Seeing a severed head in a bin “didn’t faze me at all”, she said, adding that her husband had surrendered to a group of Syrian fighters.
Begum’s family have appealed for her to be allowed to return. Her brother-in-law Mohammed Rehman told the Mail the family had spoken to her on the phone. He said: “Shamima’s mother broke down when she heard her voice ... We want her to come back so that she can be re-educated.”
The government has taken a hard line in response to the interview, with Ben Wallace, the security minister, saying: “Ultimately we have to protect the public. And people who went out there as amateurs are now professionals – terrorists or professional supporters of terrorism – and we have to make sure we mitigate that threat should they come back.”
The home secretary, Sajid Javid, said he would use all available powers to prevent Begum’s return. He told the Times: “My message is clear – if you have supported terrorist organisations abroad I will not hesitate to prevent your return. If you do manage to return you should be ready to be questioned, investigated and potentially prosecuted.”
As a British citizen, there is nothing to stop Begum returning to the UK, legal experts said, but Wallace made clear no help would be forthcoming while she was in Syria, where Britain has no consular staff.
Only those with dual nationality can have their citizenship revoked, as it is an offence in international law to leave someone stateless, said Helen Fenwick, professor of law at Durham university and an expert on counter-terrorism and human rights law.
But while Begum had the right to come home, “obviously returning in practical terms would be very difficult”.
In theory, if she were to return Begum could face prosecution on a number of grounds, said Fenwick, including supporting a proscribed group, being a member of Isis or using her social media to encourage others to follow her to Syria. She could also potentially face her child being taken into care if there were fears she wished to radicalise the child.
However, Fenwick said, securing prosecutions of those returning from Isis war zones was notoriously difficult. “People are living in a conflict zone and there are going to be a lot of conflicting stories. Many of these people will try to say they weren’t really involved, and it’s very hard to find reliable testimony to say what they were really doing.”
Counter-terrorism officials say fears of a flood of battle-hardened Britons who travelled to Isis territory returning to the UK have not materialised, but they are finding it more difficult than they hoped to get evidence of wrongdoing.
The authorities have various powers to manage returnees short of prosecution, including imposing TPIM control orders, which can restrict their movement or rights of association, and compelling them to attend de-radicalisation programmes.
Asked about the likelihood of Begum’s rehabilitation, David Toube, director of policy at the anti-extremism organisation Quilliam, described Begum’s situation as presenting “the hardest of hard cases”. “She appears to have expressed remorse only for the failure of the caliphate and its failure to live up to expectations. So she would be a very difficult person to de-radicalise in her current state of mind.”
The government says that over 900 people who pose concerns to national security have travelled from the UK to Isis-controlled territory in Syria. They estimate that 20%, some 180 people, were killed, and another 40% have returned. More than 100 women are thought to have travelled to Syria.
Shiraz Maher, the director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at Kings College, London, said there were potentially hundreds of Britons who were now in the custody of Kurdish forces and would wish to return to the UK, though their likely fate was unclear. “Most of them do express remorse and regret, but it’s a product of the fact that Isis is being defeated. They were all cheering on its atrocities and barbarism when they felt it was winning.”
In a piece for the Guardian, Barrett, who was formerly head of the United Nations al-Qaeda/Taliban monitoring team and is now director of the Global Strategy Network, said Britain was not alone “in wishing that all its citizens who joined the Islamic State would either die there or disappear ... But governments have a responsibility to address the problems created by their captured nationals and also to look more closely at why they made the choices they did.”
Tasnime Akunjee, a lawyer for Begum’s family when she first disappeared, told the Guardian the teenager should be treated as a victim, and rejected claims that it was too dangerous for British officials to travel to the camp to help facilitate her return.
Akunjee said: “There were deep failings by the police which led to the children going to a war zone. The police recognised that at the time. The situation has not really changed. She joined a proscribed organisation as a victim of grooming.”
Begum told the Times that one of the schoolfriends with whom she travelled, Kadiza Sultana, had been killed two years ago, while the other, Amira Abase, and a fourth Bethnal Green schoolgirl who left a year earlier, Sharmeena Begum, had decided to stay in Barghuz.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Hussen Abase, father of Amira Abase, said his daughter made a mistake when she fled to Syria.
“As a father I would say to the British government please let the girls back into the country and give them some kind of teaching,” he said. “They were just teenagers when they left. They should be allowed to learn from their mistakes. They are no threat to us.”
• This article was amended on 15 February 2019 to clarify a quote from David Toube.
