Last week, a British court refused an appeal by Shamima Begum, a twenty-year-old woman from London, to regain her British citizenship. Begum was deprived of her nationality last February, after she was discovered by the Times of London in a refugee camp in northern Syria for women and children who had escaped the collapse of ISIS. Begum was nineteen at the time and nine months pregnant. She had travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State, and, during her four years there, she married a Dutch jihadi and lost two children to disease. Begum identified herself to Anthony Loyd, a war reporter for the Times, after he had stopped by the al-Hawl camp on the last day of an assignment. “I am a sister from London. I’m a Bethnal Green girl,” Begum told Loyd. She was anxious about her unborn child. “I’m scared that this baby is going to get sick in this camp,” Begum said. “That’s why I really want to get back to Britain, because I know it will get taken care of, health-wise at least.” Loyd’s story ran on the front page of the newspaper. Five days later, Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary at the time, stripped Begum of her citizenship. Her baby, a boy named Jarrah, died of a respiratory infection, when he was three weeks old.
European governments have used a hodgepodge of methods to deal with citizens who went to fight for the Islamic State or live in the doomed caliphate. In 2017, during the battle for Mosul, the Wall Street Journal reported that French special forces had been sent to the city in order to enlist Iraqi soldiers to kill French nationals. Two years earlier, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, authorized drone strikes against two British men who were said to be plotting terrorist attacks from Syria. The approach to women who went to join ISIS, and children born during its tumultuous existence, has been, in general, both more lenient and more passive. In 2016, Laura Passoni, a Belgian woman who spent nine months living outside Aleppo, was fined fifteen thousand euros and given a suspended jail sentence. Albania, among other countries, has policies of monitoring, rather than prosecuting, women who married Islamic State fighters and then returned from the conflict.
When possible, most states have done nothing at all. “I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state,” Ben Wallace, the Minister of State for Security, told the BBC last year, when Begum was found. An estimated two or three thousand women and children with western European citizenship are currently thought to be at the mercy of overwhelmed justice systems and resettlement camps, struggling to cope with the aftermath of the Islamic State. Last November, the Turkish government abruptly announced that it would no longer be “a hotel for foreign terrorists” and began repatriating German women who had been picked up in former ISIS territory. At the time, Human Rights Watch reported that there were thirty British women and sixty British children under the control of Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria. The British government said that, since the United Kingdom does not have a consulate in Syria, it would not be able to “provide assistance”—although it later began to bring home British children orphaned by the conflict.
An easier option has been to try to turn difficult citizens into former citizens. “I think the government position is precisely that,” Richard Barrett, a former head of global counterterrorism for MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, told me. “If there is a way of getting rid of the problem to somewhere else, let’s get rid of the problem somewhere else.” Since 2006, Home Secretaries have been able to deprive a person of her British citizenship if it is “conducive to the public good”—a subjective rather than a strict legal test—as long as it does not leave her stateless. Until 2012, the power was rarely used. In 2016, there were fourteen cases. In 2017, a hundred and four people lost British citizenship, mostly jihadis and violent criminals, who had held dual nationality.
The decisions haven’t always been popular with other states, which have to pick up the pieces. Last August, Jack Letts, a jihadi from Oxfordshire who was imprisoned in Syria, was stripped of his citizenship after the government found out that his father was Canadian. Letts was brought up in Britain and converted to Islam when he was sixteen. He went to Syria after dropping out of school with mental-health problems. “Canada is disappointed that the United Kingdom has taken this unilateral action to off-load their responsibilities,” the office of Ralph Goodale, the country’s Minister of Public Safety, said in a statement. The British government defended its policy of removing citizenship. “This power is one way we can counter the terrorist threat posed by some of the most dangerous individuals and keep our country safe,” a spokesperson said.
Begum was fifteen when she left London with two classmates, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana. She was studying for her G.C.S.E.s at Bethnal Green Academy, a high school not far from where I live, in East London. During a school vacation, the girls took a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul and crossed into Syria by bus. Begum travelled on her older sister’s passport and wore a leopard-print scarf. The British police encouraged the girls’ families to publicize their disappearance, in the hope of changing their minds. The “Bethnal Green Girls” became a media sensation at a time when the Islamic State was seizing territory at will, along with, apparently, the minds of impressionable, smart British schoolgirls. “We hope and pray for the safe return of the pupils,” Nicky Morgan, who was, at the time, the country’s Education Secretary, wrote to their school. A few weeks later, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, suggested that the girls would not be prosecuted if they came back. “They have no reason to fear, if nothing else comes to light, that we will be treating them as terrorists,” he said.
When Loyd found Begum, he was struck by her guilelessness. She was awkward but direct. Begum described seeing the severed head of a fighter in a trash can in Raqqa. “It didn’t faze me at all,” she said. She condoned the torture and murder of Western journalists by ISIS, because she thought that they were probably spies. “Begum’s remarks were exactly what I would expect from a teen who had spent nearly three years living in the sealed echo chamber of the caliphate before turning 18,” Loyd wrote in a story for British GQ last year. In the same conversation, however, Begum questioned the legitimacy of ISIS, which had detained and tortured her husband. Her two classmates had been killed by airstrikes. She was clearly fed up. “Overall, the young woman I met that day was a paradox,” Loyd wrote. “The incomplete changeling: vulnerable, anxious and desperate to save her unborn baby, yet indoctrinated and apparently without regard for the lives of prisoners.”
International law forbids governments from rendering their citizens stateless. The British government has justified taking away Begum’s nationality on the grounds that her mother is Bangladeshi, and so she is eligible for citizenship until the age of twenty-one. This is a fiction. Begum has never lived in Bangladesh. Last May, the country’s Foreign Minister, Abdul Momen, told the BBC that Begum has “nothing to do” with Bangladesh and would be refused entry. “The British government is responsible for her,” he said. “They’ll have to deal with her.” Barrett, the former MI6 official, told me that Begum’s fate was not being driven by security concerns or logic. “This is a purely political decision,” he said. “Why one would think that Bangladesh had any better capacity to deal with somebody? It doesn’t make any sense.” In refusing Begum’s appeal last week, the U.K.’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission acknowledged that her situation at the al-Roj refugee camp, in northern Syria, exposes her to the risk of torture and degrading treatment. It is also accepted that Begum “cannot play any meaningful part in her appeal, and that, to that extent, the appeal will not be fair and effective.”
