BRITISH SCHOOLGIRL WHO JOINED DAESH MAY HAVE BEEN A VICTIM OF CHILD TRAFFICKING, COURT TOLD

Mon 21 November 2022:

A British-born woman who went to Syria as a schoolgirl to join Daesh is challenging the UK government’s decision to take away her citizenship, with her lawyers, telling a London court that she was likely “a child victim of trafficking”, Reuters reports.

Shamima Begum left London in 2015, aged 15, and travelled with two school friends to Syria, where she married a Daesh fighter and gave birth to three children, all of whom died as infants.

She was stripped of her British citizenship on national security grounds in 2019, shortly after she was found in a detention camp in Syria.

Begum, now 23, is appealing against that decision at a five-day hearing at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a specialist tribunal that hears appeals against decisions to remove citizenship on national security grounds.

Samantha Knights, representing Begum, said on Monday that the decision to remove her citizenship made Begum “effectively an exile for life”.

“This case concerns a British child aged 15 who was persuaded, influenced and affected with her friends by a determined and effective Daesh propaganda machine,” she said.

Begum’s lawyers said in written arguments that the British Home Office (Interior Ministry) had revoked her citizenship “without seeking to investigate and determine, still less consider, whether she was a child victim of trafficking”.

They also argued there was overwhelming evidence that Begum was “recruited, transported, transferred, harboured and received in Syria for the purposes of sexual exploitation”.

Her lawyers also said that Begum and her friends’ entry into Syria was “facilitated by a Canadian agent working for Daesh”.

But lawyers representing the Home Office said Begum’s case was about national security rather than trafficking.

James Eadie, representing the British government, said in written arguments that Begum had aligned with Daesh and stayed in Syria for four years, until 2019.

Eadie said Begum left Daesh territory “only as the caliphate collapsed”, adding: “Even at that stage, the evidence demonstrates that she left only for safety and not because of a genuine disengagement from the group.”

A British intelligence officer known only as Witness E, who gave evidence from behind a screen, said it was “inconceivable” that someone travelling to Syria to join Daesh in 2015 “would not know what (Daesh) was doing as a terrorist organisation”.

He said it was not conceivable that a 15-year-old “would not know what Daesh was about”, particularly a teenager who he said was predicted high grades at school.

“In some respects she would have known what she was doing and had agency in doing so,” Witness E said.

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