The Outrageous Hypocrisy of the Shamima Begum Case

A young British woman who made the mistake of her life is being scapegoated for the failed policy of regime change in Syria

When former Islamic State member Shamima Begum was found in Syria by a Times journalist in 2019, Western intervention to bring down the regime during the civil war was already a fading memory. Embarrassed by its rude return to public consciousness, not least after the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, the government quickly manoeuvred to reclaim the initiative: then home secretary Sajid Javid took the unprecedented decision to revoke her British citizenship. Taunted by the right-wing press to go further, his successor tossed the additional red meat a few months later that Begum, still a teenager at the time time, would never be allowed back.

The issue has again come to the fore after the BBC launched a 10-part podcast in which Begum, 23, tells the story of how she, like many young British Muslims, was lured by jihadist propaganda into joining the Islamic State (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) in its Levantine statelet. Some responses have been reasonable, even if you don’t agree with them - that her experience is being glamourized, that she’s being given a platform that victims of ISIS such as Yezidi girls rarely get, or that victims of UK grooming gangs still haven’t got justice so why her. But much of it is harpies-round-the guillotine stuff like “No ifs, no buts. She’s evil!” from a GB News pundit or “loathsome terrorist-lover!” from a tabloid Meister like Piers Morgan.

The Begum case has tended to centre on public image and personal impression. On one hand, ISIS are a foul bunch, as cruel as they are sanctimonious. When she was first interviewed four years ago, she recited jihadist cant in justifying beheadings and other atrocities, one report claimed she worked with ISIS’s women’s morality police squad, and another said she stitched explosives into suicide bombers’ vests. But none of that amounts to a crime unless it’s proven in court, and, aware that the only likely prosecution would be for membership in a proscribed organization, Begum was careful to state in the first episode of the podcast that she accepts she joined a terror group. On the other side, the fact is she was a minor when she signed up. Further, she was clearly the victim of brain-washing and grooming herself, and given that she had three children in the space of four years, all of whom died, she was apparently subjected to sexual exploitation too. Her legal defence for return to the UK centres on the claim, reported in The Times, that she was trafficked by an ISIS people-smuggler who was in fact a double agent working with Canadian intelligence.

Right To A Trial

But as a few have pointed out, “you can’t come back” isn’t an argument, not least when your only public hearing to date has been trial-by-press. Amid the screaming vilification and government desire to sweep the issue under any carpet it can find, there has been no deradicalization programme for the likes of Begum - a decency that Saudi Arabia at least saw fit to offer its nationals who were caught working with Al-Qa’ida in Iraq, Syria or Saudi Arabia itself. No, the state’s preference was the racist innovation of revoking the citizenship rights of an immigrant’s daughter, with two claims: 1. that her father’s status at the time of her birth in 1999 means she can be considered automatically a citizen of Bangladesh 2. that her previously acknowledged Britishness (passport, school, health, etc.) can be walked back.

Now, on the one hand this nastiness was made possible by the xenophobic atmosphere of the post-financial crisis West, which in the UK became hysterical around the time of the Brexit debate. But I would suggest there are other factors at play here. One is what some Gulf states began to do in the face of Arab Spring opposition. From 2011 a string of activists who had campaigned for political and rights reforms had their passports revoked, and were either convicted and jailed or send abroad, in one case to Thailand, in another to Malaysia, and in many Bahraini cases to Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. It also came to light in 2015 that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates had made a deal with the Comoros Islands in 2008 to buy passports for thousands of stateless citizens who failed to register their names in the 1960s and 1970s, opening the door to offloading responsibility for them.

While international rights organizations had a lot to say about this mass abuse, Western governments including the UK - vocal when it suits them - maintained a studied silence. It’s now clear why: they thought it was a novel idea they might want to try out themselves. One reason was because it elided with the drift of government policy against immigration. This was around the time of then prime minister Theresa May’s post-Brexit “citizens of nowhere” speech targeting free movement of labour. But, just as in the Gulf, it also offered a template for dealing with political headaches.

Jihad Now!

Which brings us to the second factor at play in the government’s outrageous scheme to deny a Brit the right to a fair trial in the land of their birth - the failed policy of regime change in Syria. To recap: in 2012, when the Syrian uprising had descended into a vicious civil war, the US and UK governments launched a covert operation to bring down the Assad regime through funnelling people, funds and arms to jihadist groups. Dubbed by the CIA “Timber Sycamore”, this programme went through the motions of vetting who got what, but it inevitably ended up bolstering Al-Qa’ida’s branch in Syria as well as a group that first emerged during the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq: the Islamic State.

This opportunistic gambit to topple Assad on the fly because of his alliance with Iran and Hezbollah first became an embarrassment when ISIS declared its caliphate in June 2014. It got worse when, in the face of a US refusal to stop ISIS pressing down on Damascus, Russia entered the war on the government’s side in 2015. And then the spectacular mediatized attacks began inside Western countries, including the horrendous suicide bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in which 23 people including the attacker died and 1,017 were injured.

Anyone who thinks UK covert agencies weren’t complicit in young people finding their way into Syria is deluding themselves. I saw myself as a journalist at the time how major news outlets in the Middle East picked up information about the US-UK operation in south Turkey to get people across the border when it first began in 2012. Later, at think tanks and research centres some analysts like myself tried to speak out about the folly of government policy. Only once on a research trip to Turkey did I find government officers questioning passengers before boarding flights about the nature of their travel - after the caliphate had been declared. One report published in October 2017 put the number of UK nationals who went to Syria at 850. A recent news investigation even wrote that the British killer of US journalist James Foley, whose execution by decapitation was released on video in August 2014, had been enabled to enter Syria to work with a jihadist group supported by British intelligence.

Amnesia International

The UK government would like to memory hole the entire sorry debacle and to a large extent they’ve succeeded. British media by and large isn’t interested in opening up the disastrous attempt to take out another Middle East regime, and their proximity in London to the centres of power encourages them to play along with the amnesia for the sake of access. The case of Shamima Begum - whose teen rebel years were unquestionably beyond the pale - puts the issue back in the limelight and invites the curious to dig further. They don’t want that. And denying her her day in court, if that’s what’s required, helps them get away with it.