This Week's Terror Attacks and Stories - 20:28 > UK, Yemen, Syria, Canada, USA

UK court rules IS bride Shamima Begum can return to Britain to challenge removal of citizenship

In this still taken from CCTV issued by the Metropolitan Police in London on Feb. 23, 2015, Amira Abase, left,
Kadiza Sultana, center, and Shamima Begum, walk through Gatwick airport, south of London,
before catching their flight to Turkey © AP / Metropolitan Police

Shamima Begum – one of three London schoolgirls who traveled to Syria to join Islamic State in 2015 – will be allowed to return to the UK to challenge the removal of her British citizenship, senior UK judges have ruled.

The 20-year-old left the UK five years ago and lived under IS rule for over three years. She was found in a refugee camp in February last year, and was discovered to be pregnant.

Then-UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid later revoked her British citizenship on national security grounds.

Last year, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) maintained that Begum had not been illegally rendered stateless while she was living in Syria because she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship.

The Court of Appeal partially overturned that ruling. It also stated that Javid’s decision to remove her British citizenship was “unlawful,” because of the “risk of mistreatment” that was foreseeable as a consequence of the then-home secretary’s actions.

Seriously? What about the risk of mistreatment to the British public by a determined terrorist supporter? What madness!

Finally, the judgement found that Begum could not be assured a “fair and effective appeal” against the decision while she was outside the UK and in Syria.

Sky News conducted an interview with Begum in the refugee camp in which she claimed that she was “just a housewife.” She said she left Raqqa, Syria, in January 2017 with her husband, and claimed that her children – a one-year-old girl and a three-month-old boy – had both died.

Her third child is thought to have died shortly after he was born last year.

Shamima Begum going through security at Gatwick airport, before they caught their flight to Turkey.

© AP / Metropolitan Police

Begum took legal action against the UK Home Office, claiming the government's decision was unlawful because it rendered her stateless and exposed her to a risk of death or inhuman and degrading treatment.

Responding to the ruling, the UK government said it was a “very disappointing decision,” insisting that they would appeal and apply for the court’s original judgement to be stayed until then.

And if she has the right to return, even for trial, will she be incarcerated or allowed to roam freely in the streets of London?

What happened to her husband?

Wounded children treated in Yemen hospital

after Saudi airstrike hits residential area

A heartbreaking video from RT’s video agency Ruptly shows children undergoing treatment after a Saudi airstrike hit a residential area in Yemen’s northern province of al-Jawf.

The attack on Wednesday left nine people dead and almost as many wounded, with the local officials saying that the most of the victims were women and children.

A doctor at the al-Jawf General Hospital told Ruptly that the facility received up to four kids after the airstrike. They suffered torn wounds to their limbs and bodies, with one small child having his face mutilated by shrapnel.

WARNING! GRAPHIC CONTENT

Video 3:30 in some Arabic dialect. The medical staff pull sheets up over the heads of two of the children,
but they are not dead. You can see one of them move his hand when it is pinched at about 30 seconds.

“We’re sad and in pain, as the Yemeni people are being hit while peacefully sitting in their homes, and today it was children and women who suffered,” the doctor said.

Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in Yemen in March 2015 to help reinstate the ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to power and fight the Houthi rebels who had gained control of most of the country, including the capital Sanaa.

Since then, Yemen has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes, with over 100,000 people killed, an estimated four million people displaced, and most of its 29 million residents now dependent on aid for survival.

The majority of civilian casualties during conflict have come as a result of airstrikes, with the Saudi-led coalition being blamed by international human rights groups for indiscriminate bombings and targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and markets.

Yemen has also been hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, which the UN estimated may kill even more people than the five years of fighting.

Yemen is a proxy war between Iran, which supports the Houthis, and Saudi Arabia which supports the ousted president. Iran is trying to encircle Saudi Arabia with its influence. The two countries are made up of different houses of Islam, each thinking the other is apostate.

It matters not to either country how many people die or are torn apart. It doesn't seem to matter to the US or the UK either, as both countries provide Saudi Arabia with an endless supply of weapons. 

Targeting hospitals, markets, and residential areas are not acts of war, they are acts of terror. But, rest assured, Saudi Arabia, Iran, The USA, and the UK will never be held accountable for them.

7 killed, dozens injured in car bomb attack in Syria

By Darryl Coote

July 19 (UPI) -- At least seven people were killed and dozens more were injured Sunday when a car bomb exploded in northern Syria near the Turkish border, a British-based monitor of the nearly decade-old civil war said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that five civilians and two unidentified people were killed Sunday evening in the explosion at a roundabout near the Bab al-Salam border crossing with Turkey.

More than 60 people, including women and children, were injured in the blast, it said.

Those injured in Azaz were transported to Turkey for treatment, Turkish state media Anadolu Agency reported, though stating the number of injured was at least 85.

The Syrian monitor blamed the Islamic State for the attack, which followed Turkish forces launching raids and arrests against the terrorist organization in the Turkish forces-controlled Northern Aleppo province following an IS assassination of a local official in the region in late June.

Meanwhile, Turkish state media blamed the attack on YPG/PKK Kurdish fighters, who Turkey views as terrorists and has launched several operations into Syria to push them back from the border.

Since the Syrian civil war began in March 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, more than 5 million people have fled the country and 6 million more have displaced within the war-torn nation, according to the United Nations.

Bab al-Salam border crossing Turkey-Syria

Alleged ISIS member from Calgary charged with terrorism: RCMP

By Stewart Bell Global News

A Calgary man has been charged with terrorism offences for allegedly travelling to Syria in 2013 and joining the so-called Islamic State, the RCMP said on Wednesday.

The charges allege that Hussein Sobhe Borhot participated in a kidnapping on behalf of ISIS.

The arrest of the 34-year-old followed what police described as an “extensive and complex” national security investigation that spanned seven years.

He was taken into custody in Calgary on Tuesday and faces four terrorism-related charges including participation in the activity of a terrorist group and commission of an offence for a terrorist group.

There is more on this story on Global News

Two of the ISIS terrorists dubbed the Beatles admit involvement in captivity of Kayla Mueller, James Foley

In exclusive interviews, the two men, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, for the first time admitted their involvement in the captivity of Mueller

ISIS terrorists known as 'The Beatles' admit involvement in captivity of slain Americans

By Ken Dilanian, Anna Schecter and Richard Engel, NBC News

WASHINGTON — Two of the British ISIS terrorists dubbed the “Beatles” further incriminated themselves in the mistreatment of Western hostages in Syria, including Americans Kayla Mueller and James Foley, in interviews obtained exclusively by NBC News.

In the interviews, the two men, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, for the first time admitted their involvement in the captivity of Kayla, an aid worker who was tortured and sexually abused before her death in 2015.

Kotey said, "She was in a room by herself that no one would go in."

Elsheikh got into more detail, saying, "I took an email from her myself," meaning he got an email address the Islamic State militant group could use to demand ransom from the family. "She was in a large room, it was dark, and she was alone, and … she was very scared."

In one email reviewed by NBC News, ISIS demanded the Muellers pay 5 million euros and threatened that if the demands weren’t met, they would send the family “a picture of Kayla's dead body.”

Kayla Mueller, 26, an American humanitarian worker from Prescott, Arizona with her mother Marsha Mueller. Reuters file

Elsheikh also implicated himself in the abuse of American James Foley. “I didn't choke Jim,” he said. “If I choked Jim I would say I choked him. I mean, I've — I've hit him before. I've hit most of the prisoners before.”

He said that sometimes Foley would let himself become a target to make sure hostages got enough food. Said Elsheikh, “If the guard would ask, ‘Is the food enough?" some of the other prisoners were very timid. It was always him who would say, ‘It's not enough’” and take the risk of retaliation from guards.

Kotey and Elsheikh are both in U.S. military custody in Iraq amid questions over how and when they will face justice. U.S. and British authorities say the so-called “Beatles” were responsible for 27 killings, including the beheadings of Americans Foley, Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig, and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.

The families of American hostages murdered by ISIS tell NBC News they are urging the Trump administration to try them in a U.S. civilian court.

"They did so much horror to so many people," Kayla's mother, Marsha Mueller, said. "They need to be brought here. They need to be prosecuted. The other thing that's really important to me about this is I need information about Kayla. We know so little about what happened to her."

I wonder if it might not be better not to know.

There is more to this story on NBC News including a video.

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