Originally published 2021-06-19.
In June 2021, Shamima Begum, then 21, gave an interview from al-Roj, a detention camp for families of Islamic State members in north-east Syria, asking to be allowed back to Britain. She had left her home in Bethnal Green, east London, at 15 to join ISIS, and the UK government had stripped her of her British citizenship in 2019. Speaking to British filmmaker Andrew Drury, she said she did not see herself as a terrorist but as just a dumb kid who made one mistake
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Her plea did not change the outcome. Over the next three years she lost every legal challenge, ending in August 2024 when the UK Supreme Court refused to hear a final appeal. As of the last court rulings, she remained in al-Roj, and her case is still one of the most debated questions in British public life: what should a country do with citizens who joined a terrorist group as children?
Who Shamima Begum is
Begum was born in London in August 1999 to parents of Bangladeshi heritage and grew up in Tower Hamlets, attending Bethnal Green Academy. In February 2015 she and two schoolfriends, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, flew to Turkey and crossed into territory held by the Islamic State. A fourth girl from the same school had travelled a few months earlier.
About ten days after arriving, she was married to Yago Riedijk, a Dutch convert who had joined ISIS. They had three children. All three died young, the last a baby boy who died of pneumonia in a camp in March 2019, weeks after he was born.
In February 2019, as the group's last territory collapsed, a Times journalist, Anthony Loyd, found her heavily pregnant in al-Hawl camp. Within days, the then Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, removed her British citizenship on national security grounds. She was later moved to al-Roj.
What she said in the 2021 interview
Drury met her for a film in his Danger Zone project. Reports at the time noted how different she looked from the young woman photographed in a black niqab in 2019: she wore jeans and a baseball cap, with no hijab. She explained that choosing her own clothes made her happy, and that anything bringing happiness in the camp felt like a lifeline. She also said she passed time listening to rap and watching old episodes of Friends.
She said she had gone to Syria because she did not want to be left behind when her friends left, and described being young and naive. She argued that her friends had been groomed by ISIS recruiters who made them feel guilty about the suffering of Muslims in Syria and promised they would be part of something. She added that she did not believe she needed rehabilitation, but would like to help rehabilitate others.
Asked what she would say to Britons who opposed her return, she answered: Can I come home please, pretty please?
She also accused the government of exaggerating her commitment to extremist ideology and insisted she had never supported the group's crimes.
Andrew Drury's change of mind
Drury, who has filmed in many conflict zones, said that meeting her changed his view. As they said goodbye, he recalled, she became tearful and asked him for a hug. Afterwards he described her as a vulnerable young woman who had made a childish mistake at 15, and said she should be allowed to come home to face British justice.
Many people disagreed strongly. Critics pointed out that in her first interviews in 2019 she showed little remorse, and that she reportedly declined to condemn the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, which killed 22 people, comparing it to coalition airstrikes on ISIS-held towns. For them, her later softer tone looked like a strategy rather than a change of heart.
Grief, guilt and her two friends
Begum's story overlaps with that of a separate documentary, The Return: Life After ISIS, directed by Alba Sotorra and released in 2021, in which she spoke at length about losing her children. She described feeling completely alone after her daughter died and said that only the baby she was carrying kept her going. She blamed herself for not getting the children out sooner.
Her two schoolfriends did not come home either. Kadiza Sultana was reported by her family's lawyer to have been killed in an airstrike in Raqqa in 2016. What happened to Amira Abase has never been confirmed. Begum said she felt she had no friends left, because they had been everything to her.
The legal battle over her citizenship
Under British law, the Home Secretary can remove citizenship if it is conducive to the public good, but not if doing so would leave a person stateless. The government argued that Begum was a Bangladeshi citizen by descent, so she was not made stateless; Bangladesh said she was not its citizen. The courts later accepted that she held Bangladeshi citizenship from birth under that country's law.
Her case then moved through several stages:
- July 2020: the Court of Appeal ruled she should be allowed to return to fight her case fairly.
- February 2021: the Supreme Court overturned that, ruling that national security came first and she could not return to pursue her appeal.
- 22 February 2023: the Special Immigration Appeals Commission rejected her challenge, even while accepting there was a credible suspicion she had been trafficked.
- 23 February 2024: the Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed her appeal.
- 7 August 2024: the Supreme Court refused permission to appeal.
Her lawyers said they would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. Their central argument has been that the Home Office failed to consider whether she was a child victim of trafficking; reports have linked her journey to a smuggler who was allegedly also working for Canadian intelligence.
Why the case still divides opinion
Supporters of the decision say the government's first duty is to protect the public, that she chose to join a group responsible for mass murder, slavery and terror attacks, and that the courts have examined the evidence repeatedly. Opponents say Britain is exporting its problem to an overstretched camp run by Kurdish-led forces, that a 15-year-old groomed online should be treated as a child victim, and that the right answer is to bring citizens home and prosecute them if there is evidence of crimes.
Several European countries, and the United States, have repatriated some of their nationals from the Syrian camps, while others, including the UK, have taken few. Begum is not the only British woman left in al-Roj. Whatever one thinks of her, the case raises lasting questions about how far citizenship can be withdrawn, how the law treats children drawn into extremism, and who is responsible for the thousands still held in north-east Syria.
Sources: Wikipedia: Shamima Begum; JURIST, 7 August 2024; original interview reporting credited to the Daily Mail, June 2021.
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