Shamima Begum faces decades stuck inside a grim Syrian detention camp after losing her final UK court bid to retrieve her British citizenship. The jihadi bride’s legal team are now preparing to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, but if this fails she faces a deeply uncertain fate in one of the world’s most dangerous and conflict-riven regions. The 24-year-old is currently being held in Al Roj, a filthy, brutal temporary tent city teeming with dangerous ISIS loyalists who use threats and beatings to enforce their extremist ideology.
Assuming she is unable to return to the UK, Ms Begum will be held indefinitely inside the camp, which could remain open for as long as 20 years at the current rates of repatriation, according to UN special rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. But Katherine Cornett, from Reprieve, believes the volatile security situation could soon cause the camp to collapse, meaning she faces being transferred to the jurisdiction of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, ‘disappeared’ or killed. Ms Begum lost an appeal last year against the decision to revoke her citizenship on national security grounds at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC). Yesterday, Supreme Court judges ruled that Ms Begum could not appeal again after she lost a Court of Appeal bid in February. While her lawyers have vowed to petition the European Court of Human Rights, she looks set to remain in Syria.
Al Roj in northeastern Syria, where Ms Begum was moved to in 2019 after being found in nearby Al Hol, is home to around 2,600 detainees from 55 countries, many of them ISIS brides and their children. The camp is guarded by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), but with the region still riven by armed conflict there are fears that ‘the status quo won’t hold’. Katherine Cornett, head of unlawful detentions at Reprieve – which is campaigning for Ms Begum’s return – told MailOnline: ‘The conditions these British families are held in are horrific, but unless the UK Government brings them home, all the alternatives are worse.’ Both the US and the Kurdish authorities have frequently warned that the prison camps are vulnerable and unstable. ISIS cells have attacked detention facilities in the region before and could do so again.
‘If the camps collapse, British women and children would likely be killed or captured and re-trafficked. And transfer to Assad’s Syria or Iraq likely means punishment, disappearance or death. ‘Security experts are unanimous that the only safe solution is for countries including the UK to repatriate their nationals. ‘The US has said this time and again, most recently Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in May, when US personnel brought 11 Americans home. It is long past time for the UK Government to follow their example.’ British judges have previously ruled that Ms Begum had not been left stateless by the decision to strip her of her British citizenship because she retained the right to Bangladeshi citizenship through her mother. But there is no prospect of her moving to the country, with Bangladesh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs previously saying Ms Begum is not a Bangladeshi citizen and has never applied to be one. And in May 2019, Bangladesh’s foreign minister said the jihadi bride could face the death penalty for involvement in terrorism if she ever tried to.
Turkish air strikes targeting Kurdish fighters mean conditions inside Al Roj are ‘extremely volatile’, with power and water supplies cut, according to the Red Cross. Al Roj’s director, Rashid Omar, revealed in March that ISIS supporters control much of the camp’s interior, with Ms Begum considered ‘courageous’ because she was ‘one of few’ women in the camp who have refused to wear niqab – a veil which covers the entire entire body and face, excluding the eyes. Mr Omar, 39, told the Times that in Al Roj, ‘women get beaten for disobeying orders, and then are threatened with death to stop them reporting these assaults’. But this hasn’t stopped Ms Begum from walking around the camp in Primark clothes, Nike trainers, and wearing makeup that was allegedly smuggled in by some of the SDF soldiers guarding the gates of the facility. During his interview earlier this year, Mr Omar said a 14-year-old boy had emerged as the senior ISIS enforcer inside the camp, imposing strict religious rules and preaching extremist doctrine. The teenager is said to have gathered other youth around him to reestablish the terrorist group in the camp after the last IS-held village in Baghouz was overrun by Kurdish-led forces when he was nine years old. ‘He is like the Islamic State emir in this camp,’ Mr Omar said.
The boys are described as leading a gang of male youths who enforce their rules by threatening adult women with brutal beatings if the boys believe the women did something wrong. They have made improvised weapons to arm themselves and indoctrinate the next generation in weekly khutbah sermons where they share their extremist ideology. ‘Whenever we try looking for him, the other kids start rising against us. There are a lot of teenagers with him in this camp,’ he said. In their decision yesterday denying Ms Begum permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, Lords Reed, Hodge and Lloyd-Jones found her proposed grounds for appeal ‘do not raise an arguable point of law’. The three justices said that there was no arguable challenge to the Court of Appeal’s decision, including whether Ms Begum should have been able to make representations to the then-Home Secretary before the removal of her citizenship.
After the decision was announced, a statement from her legal practice Birnberg Peirce sent to MailOnline said: ‘It is a matter of the gravest concern that British women and children have been arbitrarily imprisoned in a Syrian camp for five years, all detained indefinitely without any prospect of a trial. ‘All other countries in the UK’s position have intervened and achieved the return of their citizens and their children. ‘Two weeks ago the US State Department once again addressed the responsibility of countries to repatriate their nationals from the camps in north east Syria. The UK is now alone in its position. ‘The UK courts have for five years offered no exit route despite the critical humanitarian crisis in the camps. Instead the Supreme Court has today left resolution to another court, this time in Strasbourg. ‘Whilst on behalf of Ms Begum we, her lawyers, will take every possible legal step including to petition the European Court of Human Rights, this is an issue that can and should as the US urges, be resolved for all nationals by their own countries.’ Ms Begum left London in February 2015, aged 15, and travelled with two school friends – Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase – to Syria. While there, she married an ISIS fighter and gave birth to three children, all of whom died as infants.
The British government took away her citizenship on national security grounds in 2019, shortly after she was found in a detention camp in Syria. She said the decision left her stateless – and it meant she was not able to return to Britain. Ms Begum argued the decision was unlawful, in part because British officials failed to properly consider whether she was a victim of trafficking. But this argument was rejected by the SIAC specialist tribunal in February 2023. She then went to the Court of Appeal, where her legal team argued that the government had failed to consider its legal duties to Ms Begum as a potential victim of trafficking. But the court ruled that the risk to national security took precedence. The court also ruled that Ms Begum had not been left stateless because she retained Bangladeshi citizenship through her mother.
Her lawyer told the SIAC hearing that her client had been ‘influenced’ along with her friends by a ‘determined and effective’ ISIS ‘propaganda machine’. The appeal court accepted that Ms Begum ‘may well have been influenced and manipulated by others’, but added she could ‘still have made a calculated decision to travel to Syria’. Dismissing her Court of Appeal challenge in February, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, said: ‘It could be argued the decision in Ms Begum’s case was harsh. ‘It could also be argued that Ms Begum is the author of her own misfortune, but it is not for this court to agree or disagree with either point of view. ‘The only task of the court was to assess whether the deprivation decision was unlawful. Since it was not, Ms Begum’s appeal is dismissed.’
In March, Court of Appeal judges rejected Begum’s initial bid to take her case to the Supreme Court. Around 900 people are estimated to have travelled from Britain to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. Of those, around 150 are believed to have been stripped of their citizenship, according to government figures. In 2021, Ms Begum was interviewed by Good Morning Britain and begged for forgiveness and insisted she was a victim – not a terrorist or a criminal. ‘No one can hate me more than I hate myself for what I’ve done, and all I can say is I’m sorry and just give me a second chance’, she said, before adding she was ‘groomed and taken advantage of and manipulated’.
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