Update: 11 Mar 2019 - Shamima had her baby in Syria,
but it apparently has died.
..
Remember these girls? Left the UK to join ISIS. Now, one wants to come home.
(L to R) British teenagers Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum at Gatwick Airport, UK
© AFP / Metropolitan Police
A British teenage ISIS recruit who left home to fight for the self-styled caliphate has called on her government to bring her home from Syria, but the UK security minister has warned that “actions have consequences.”
Shamima Begum was one of three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green in East London who traveled to Syria four years ago to join Islamic State. She has pleaded to be allowed back into the UK in an interview with the Times.
However, government minister Ben Wallace told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that he would not risk the lives of British officials “to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state.” He warned Begum that she had the right to return, but could face prosecution at the very least.
Begum, a 19-year-old who is nine-months pregnant with her third child, told the newspaper in an interview from a refugee camp in northeast Syria: “All I want to do is come home to Britain.”
She said that her two children died of malnutrition and illness, and she hopes that the baby she is now expecting would be looked after “health-wise, at least” back in the UK.
Begum said she had no regrets about joining IS in Syria, but claimed that she is “not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away.”
No! Now she is the silly 19 y/o who thinks she can just say sorry and go home. It's not that I am without sympathy. She was 15, and at 15 there are laws that are supposed to protect you from sexual abuse, online extortion, grooming, etc. What happened to those girls was as much grooming as was done to the thousands of 15 y/o white, British girls by hordes of Pakistani Muslim men.
Most people are horrified at those crimes and don't blame the children. Those who did blame the children were the police and councils that enabled the abuse to continue for decades. These children should not be held completely responsible for being groomed and manipulated by ISIS recruiters. The government may have some complicity for allowing it to happen.
However, Shamima's intent to return is motivated by a good and accessible health care system, not by a 'Road to Damascus' moment where she realized she was assisting monstrously evil people do monstrously evil things.
At the very least she should not be allowed to return until after the baby is born, if at all. IMHO, she should not be permitted to return until she turns her back on Islam. Her lack of regret means she is still a danger to a free society.
When Wallace was asked whether the UK would be more lenient on someone who was only 15 years old when they ran away, he bluntly insisted: “People know what they’re getting into.”
Begum and her two schoolmates, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, traveled to Syria in February 2015. They joined a fourth Bethnal Green girl, Sharmeena Begum, who had left London at the end of 2014. Each married an IS fighter.
Labour MP for Bethnal Green, Rushanara Ali, says that if the teenager is trying to return to the UK then it is a matter “for the police, security services and the Foreign Office,” who will “need to consider public safety and national security.”
Bethnal Green, London
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