When she ran away to join an Islamic State in 2015, Shamima Begum violated the law.
A year earlier, then Home Secretary Theresa May had applied powers under section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to make the death cult a proscribed organisation, and having anything to do with the group was punishable by up to 10 years in jail or a fine, and Shamima Begum, by all accounts was an intelligent girl and knew what she was doing.
But when Boris Johnson decided to impose Chris Grayling as chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, he was in violation of section 1 (6) of the Justice and Security Act 2013, which says it’s not up to him, and he knew what he was doing as well.
There were uncorroborated reports of what Shamima Begum did during her time in Syria, good and bad.
All we know for sure is that at the age of 15 years old, she married a 23-year-old Dutch convert in a ceremony that would not be accepted as legitimate in Dutch or British law.
Ten days later, he was imprisoned by ISIS as a spy, but after his release, Shamima Begum had 3 children. Her first died of malnutrition, and a third of pneumonia in a refugee camp.
When Shamima Begum left the United Kingdom, police said she’d committed no crimes and would not be treated as a subversive, but after ISIS collapsed, the government stripped her of British citizenship under the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, on the grounds she was not conducive to the public good.
That same law says a British citizen must not be declared stateless unless there are just grounds for believing that another country could take them, which was in this instance, her parent’s home country of Bangladesh, which was a place she’d never been.
Pregnant Shamima Begum was found by a media outlet and her first-ever interview was printed on February 13, 2019.
She said she didn’t regret her actions, and that seeing a severed head didn’t faze her at all, but that by the end she just couldn’t take any more, and all she wanted to do was to come home to Britain.
A day later Sajid Javid announced to the media that he’d stripped her of citizenship, but he didn’t sign the paperwork until later on, but when Shamima Begum gave birth to her third child, that child had automatic British citizenship, and two days after that, Bangladesh said she wouldn’t be permitted to enter the country.
Both factors meant, under the law, Shamima Begum must have her citizenship returned and it was not, and Sajid Javid told the Home Office Affairs Select Committee he would never remove citizenship if it made someone stateless.
He said that he hadn’t done that and he wasn’t knowledgeable that one of his predecessors had done that in a case where they knew a person only has one citizenship, as that would be violating international law.
A year later, Shamima Begum lost a bid to return to the United Kingdom and argue the case, but the ruling was overthrown by the Court of Appeal, but the Home Office has stated it will counter appeal, and that it may end up in the Supreme Court, in a year or more’s time.
In the 5 years since she joined ISIS, there’s been no obvious proof that Shamima Begum violated any other laws.
Shamima Begum was born in England and she was radicalised here and failed by our police and government and she is our responsibility, and when a friend of hers joined ISIS, Shamima Begum was questioned by counter-terrorism police without the knowledge of her parents, and according to the lawyers for the family, she was not referred to the Prevent anti-terror scheme, but both were criminal.
Parliament was told that when she left for Syria, it took 2 days for the Foreign Office to notify the Turkish government, by way of an overnight email.
It was 3 days before police arranged a BBC appeal, and four days for the information to be given to Interpol.
Several weeks later, evidence surfaced a Canadian man had helped the girls across into Syria, but because she was deemed a minor and a victim of international trafficking, grooming, and forced marriage, Shamima Begum should have been protected by international law, the United Nations, and the UK government.
In legislation written by the Coalition in 2014, Shamima Begum was a victim of child abuse and had a claim to lifelong anonymity, and whoever trafficked or coerced her into marriage overseas can be tried and imprisoned in the United Kingdom.
But it’s still reported the Foreign Office will spend no attempt to bring her home, although none of this means shes innocent. She’s blameworthy of at least one pretty serious wrong, but she appears to have done little damage with it.
Shamima Begum’s story is not of a glorious jihadi, but a pitiful follower, and she’s the antithesis of an advert for ISIS, and it’s a bit like crashing your car into a tree, failing to die, and then being charged with dangerous driving, and you have to question if it’s deserving of the paperwork.
Boris Johnson wasn’t born in England, but in New York and in the years since, the USA has allowed many thousands of its children to be slain by guns, and its citizens being drugged by CIA funded crack cocaine, and its people terrorised by white supremacists.
Boris Johnson didn’t relinquish his US citizenship until he was 52, but then, being American isn’t a felony, although last year, the Supreme Court ruled Boris Johnson wasn’t conducive to anything good either.
His determination to prorogue Parliament broke the law because it had the effect of preventing or hindering the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional duties.
Closing Parliament destroyed the lives and freedoms of 66 million people. The Supreme Court reinstated them quickly, but Boris Johnson’s acknowledgement that he deeply opposed damage trust and support for the judiciary, which superintends more than 2 million criminal and civil cases every year.
And his persistent bigotry, misogyny and other hate speech have never reached the threshold for prosecution because closing Parliament isn’t a violation, neither is breaking the Highway Code, delaying the Russia report, hunting headlines, lying to journalists, banishing someone to an unfamiliar land, imposing a committee chairman or misleading Parliament.
But they’re all extremely damaging to this country, and against our basic democratic values, and it’s extremely doubtful that the Secretary of State will be penalised for illegally stripping someone of citizenship for political reasons, or refusing to bring home a British victim of child molestation.
Politics and terrorism should be a long way apart, and it shouldn’t be possible to draw similarities between them. Yet here we have two people, who qualified for and lost citizenship in various ways, both of whom broke the rules.
One is being punished with severity greater than the harm she’s done, and the other isn’t being punished at all, and no matter how severe or insignificant the crimes are, if breaking the law carries no punishment, then there’s no law.
Shamima Begum should be returned to the United Kingdom and tried for the crimes she’s accused of perpetrating against us. Otherwise, what’s the point of outlawing ISIS? And the officials who allowed her to be groomed, trafficked and violated should face investigation, or they will make the same mistakes with other children.
And Boris Johnson, whose reach is far greater, and a listing of crimes far longer must be tried for his transgressions – for the 65,000 excess deaths, Parliamentary gerrymandering, deceptions, perversions, and damage to the institutions which are what stand between us and fear.
And possibly more than anything else, he must be judged for telling a child rape victim that she can find her own way home, so if she’s guilty, then so is he.
And Sir Keir Starmer needs to make a statement on his position on this. Does he support the Government in stopping her coming back, or not?
But it’s not about whether Boris Johnson should have supported Shamima Begum returning or not, he broke the law when he did what he did, and now he’s having to pay the price for her possible return – had he done what the law stated, she could have been removed from Britain legally and not permitted to return, but now he will wait to see which way the wind blows before he says anything on the matter.
It would be pleasing to believe that the people of the United Kingdom are understanding and liberally inclined, however, when it comes to Shamima Begum, words tend to fail me because she has on the numerous occasions that she’s been interviewed, failed to show one ounce of empathy for the innocent victims who were savagely butchered by the despicable cult she supported, and would presumably still be supporting had they not been defeated.
However, she was a British citizen at the time, and perhaps rather than extraditing her to another country, this government should have put her on trial, however, they couldn’t because she’d done nothing wrong, aside from supporting a vile faction.
There were tens of thousands of children living under the control of ISIS – children they actively recruited as their next crop of soldiers.
They teach them how to load and strip guns and how to be in the shooting position, and boys as young as 14 years old joined ISIS after they convinced them they were true Muslims. Children would then give everything to Islamic State’s victory because they believed it was being oppressed by everyone, and they told these children that they should give everything to them, and even sacrifice themselves.
And boys who’ve undergone ISIS training said that they’re also being shown something much more dangerous, and that in the religious military camps you learn something called listening and obeying, and that you must listen and obey even if you have to die.
ISIS called these children cubs of the caliphate, and children were being systematically recruited across ISIS.
It’s really difficult but the principal intention is to produce a new army of unquestioning, and what ISIS considers, ideologically pure fighters, and they’re making a new generation for the Caliphate to fight infidels, and there are countless children who had complete loyalty.
It’s that loyalty that ISIS was utilising for another horrifying purpose, and it began with showing children videos of suicide attacks. The scenes were repeated again and again, and when the child saw them, he then thought he wanted to do the same as them, so that they would go to ISIS and say they wanted to become a suicide bomber.
The youngest boy who wanted to be a suicide bomber was eight years old, just a child, and because he was a child, you would never be able to convince him to give up his beliefs.
But convincing young children to sacrifice their lives without issue needed intense brainwashing, and there were teachers who prepared girls as young as 10 years old for suicide attacks.
They pushed them into jihad and told these girls that they would all die martyrs and reach Heaven, all of them and that it was written in the Quran that they had to fight jihad, and they all had to join jihad for the sake of God and the Islamic State.
But that the most crucial thing to make them understand is that President Bashar’s state was infidel and that everyone should fight them, and that was God’s word, essentially indoctrinating children.
Children were trained to spy on their parents, who risked death if they objected to their children joining ISIS, and boys were routinely gathered in town squares, where they were given money and food to join ISIS and fed anti-western tirades.
And when they gathered the children, they would say for them to come and fight jihad in the name of God and they would enter Heaven. They said that they would enjoy it and that they would give them many things, and countless children followed.
The boys were made to assemble in front of large screens and made to watch videos of ISIS cruelty and propaganda movies, and they showed them how to kill President Bashar’s soldiers – sometimes they tried not to watch, but when they did watch they were frightened, and they were ordered to watch actual executions too.
But perhaps most disturbingly of all, ISIS released videos showing beheadings being carried out by boys themselves, and boys were told they would be executed if they didn’t join ISIS by 16.
But death was not the only punishment for refusing to join ISIS. ISIS fighters would capture young children and torture them into forcing them to join.
They would string them up and torture them for a month and a half, saying, why don’t they pledge allegiance to Islamic State? Why don’t you fight against the non-Muslims with us? Yet they were slaughtering Muslims.
Some refused to join and they were condemned to a horrifying punishment. Where they would gather people, fasten their hand and leg and put their hand on a wooden block and cut off their hand with a butcher’s knife, then cut off the foot and put them in front of them to see, and the price of resistance was consistent pain and depression.
Thousands of children have been born or raised in the Islamic State, and now the world’s governments have to decide how and whether to reintegrate them into their societies and as the militants retain only a small sliver of territory in Syria, Western countries are being compelled to grapple with how to deal with children who qualify for citizenship through their parents, including foreign fighters who carried out atrocities overseas.
And the plea from the British ISIS bride to return to the United Kingdom with her infant son demonstrates that problem.
British teenagers Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum passed through the security barriers at Gatwick Airport near London as they began their mission to Syria in 2015 – Shamima Begum was age 15 at the time.
Her child is innocent and has every right to grow up in the peace and safety of this homeland, and while it’s not clear how far Shamima Begum’s association with ISIS went, she’s been cited as saying that she had no regrets about moving to Syria, and such remarks have triggered a debate in Britain about whether Shamima Begum could or should be rehabilitated back into society.
But under international law, countries are bound to allow their nationals to return home. However, European countries have been unwilling to take back homegrown fighters, and their families believe they’re safer outside of Europe.
Britain has even gone so far as to revoke the citizenship of more than 100 ISIS soldiers who had dual nationality, and minister Sajid Javid wrote in an opinion piece that while he felt compassion for any child born or brought into a battle zone, when analysing the repatriation of their parents who joined the Islamic State he had to consider the safety and security of children living in the United Kingdom.
But saying that, any country which chooses to penalise children for the misdeeds of their parents will be haunted by that choice in years to come, and it could be regarded as shortsightedness by governments because you can’t just leave small children in the desert, in the wilderness because they’re going to grow to be wild or feel the need or urge to exact retribution.
Only Russia has so far repatriated any children of Islamic State fighters. The children were aged between 4 and 13 years old.
The government have a legal and moral duty to help these children reintegrate, it’s not their fault that their fathers were murderers and their mothers were participants in the Islamic State.
And President Donald Trump had called on European countries to take back the captured ISIS fighters or risk them being released. He was also asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that were captured in Syria and to put them on trial.
France stated it would repatriate ISIS fighters on a case by case basis and Germany said that while citizens have the right to return home, it was difficult for the government to estimate how many German citizens had really been affected.
ISIS recruits who wanted to return home to the United Kingdom would have to go to a British Consulate in Iraq or Turkey and the same would apply for their children.
Couples living in the caliphate were urged to marry young and to have as many children as possible so the next generation could continue to carry the jihad banner, and countless ISIS fighters also married more than one woman.
Children would be forced to watch and participate in the execution of ISIS prisoners, and the motto of ISIS was that these children were never too young to start thinking about jihad and brainwashing children into violence was very much part of their ethos.
An ISIS math textbook that was acquired by a media outlet showing images of guns, bullets and tanks to better demonstrate basic math, while an English language workbook used drawings of bombs to teach them how to read the time and the working premise should be that the children of ISIS-linked parents are both vulnerable and dangerous.
Risk assessments would be needed on a case by case basis, with those closest to the age of 18 being more able of posing a substantial threat because some of these children have received bomb training.
This is what you call real child abuse, and this is a doctrine that makes innocent and adorable children into revolutionaries, and this is particularly disturbing because innocents are beautiful and we were all children once, so how can anyone do this to a child?
These are underprivileged children that ISIS turn into monsters, and indoctrination is the worst crime, not only for their victims but also for those around the victims and society.
And in a typical primary school, a pupil would learn A is for apple but children who have been brainwashed by ISIS, these children learn that A is for AK47, and many of these children will never see their adulthood, get married, leave home or even have children.
But this is a very difficult thing to reverse, although it is quite possible and those children could end up using their ability to help better the world. But if we do start to accept refugees, we need to start vetting people again.
Do Americans even vet Americans anymore? The thing is we’re creating terrorism everywhere, and America has been way worse than what other countries have been in recent years.
We keep reacting on hate, and then all we do is promote even more hate, and we’re starting to lose control of everything, but we have to help people if we can because real strength comes from striving for what’s right, and it’s right to help guide children to a better path.
These poor inexperienced children suffer from idiots because children think it’s a game, they don’t know it’s war.
Religion is the creation of spirituality into something that became the handmaiden of champions, and almost all religions were brought to people and forced on people by conquerors and used as the frame to dominate their thoughts.
But now religion is viewed by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as beneficial.
But now men can’t seem to take on armies, they would rather put their children into combat because they’re so desperate for a win they would rather endanger their children’s lives.
Brainwashing sticks to these children’s brains like superglue and might be difficult to remove, but ordinary people across the globe are being indoctrinated by media organisations, and they use everything to brainwash you, lyrics, songs, adverts and countless more.
Who are the real victims? And I’m not condoning or supporting ISIS for their actions, I’m simply wondering where all this hatred came from.
Remember these children didn’t all join the Islamic State, many of them were violated into doing so, and it now seems that humanity is the plague.
But just bear in mind that ISIS is ISIS and Islam is something entirely separate, and not all Muslims are ISIS. However, there are millions of communities, cultures and ethnicity in the world, all created by the human brain, seeking to demonstrate their point.
And as humans, we love the Game which has given birth to religions, and religion is a virus or a blessing and it all runs on how you want to believe it – sadly, there’s no reversing what happened to these children.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 