Girl who ran away to Syria and IS wants to return to UK

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
17,577
9,268
136
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47229181

article said:
One of three schoolgirls who left east London in 2015 to join the Islamic State group says she has no regrets, but wants to return to the UK.
In an interview with the Times, Shamima Begum, now 19, talked about seeing "beheaded heads" in bins - but said that it "did not faze her".
Speaking from a refugee camp in Syria, she said she was nine months pregnant and wanted to come home for her baby.
She said she'd had two other children who had both died.
She also described how one of her two school friends that had left the UK with her had died in a bombing. The fate of the third girl is unclear.

"I applied to marry an English-speaking fighter between 20 and 25 years old," she said.
Ten days later she married a 27-year-old Dutch man who had converted to Islam.
She has been with him since then, and the couple escaped from Baghuz - the group's last territory in eastern Syria - two weeks ago.
Her husband surrendered to a group of Syrian fighters as they left, and she is now one of 39,000 people in a refugee camp in northern Syria.
Asked by Times journalist Anthony Loyd whether her experiences of living in the one-time IS stronghold of Raqqa had lived up to her aspirations, Ms Begum said: "Yes, it did. It was like a normal life. The life that they show on the propaganda videos - it's a normal life.
"Every now and then there are bombs and stuff. But other than that..."
She said that seeing her first "severed head" in a bin "didn't faze me at all".
"It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam.
"I thought only of what he would have done to a Muslim woman if he had the chance," she said.
"I'm not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago," she told Mr Loyd.
"I don't regret coming here."

But Ms Begum said the "oppression" had come as a "shock" and said she felt the IS "caliphate" was at an end.
"I don't have high hopes. They are just getting smaller and smaller," she said. "And there is so much oppression and corruption going on that I don't really think they deserve victory."
She referred to her husband having been held in a prison where men were tortured.

A lawyer for the family of Kadiza Sultana said in 2016 that she was believed to have been killed in a Russian air strike.
Ms Begum told the Times her friend had died in a bombing on a house where there was "some secret stuff going on" underground.
She added: "I never thought it would happen. At first I was in denial. Because I always thought if we got killed, we'd get killed together."
'Scared this baby is going to get sick'
Ms Begum said losing two children "came as a shock. It just came out of nowhere, it was so hard".
Her first child, a girl, died at the age of one year and nine months, and was buried in Baghuz a month ago.
Her second child - the first to die - died three months ago at the age of eight months, of an illness that was compounded by malnutrition, the Times reports.
She told the paper she took him to a hospital. "There were no drugs available, and not enough medical staff," she said.
As a result she said she was "really overprotective" of her unborn child.
She said this concern also contributed to her decision to leave Baghuz.
"I was weak," she said. "I could not endure the suffering and hardship that staying on the battlefield involved.
"But I was also frightened that the child I am about to give birth to would die like my other children if I stayed on."
She said she remained scared her unborn baby would become ill in the refugee camp.
"That's why I really want to get back to Britain because I know it will be taken care of - health-wise, at least," she said.
She said she should be giving birth "any day now".
"I'll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child."

Security minister Ben Wallace said he could not comment on Ms Begum's case for legal reasons but said any Britons who had gone to Syria to engage or support terrorist activities should be prepared to be questioned, investigated and potentially prosecuted if they came back to the UK.
He said there was no consular assistance in Syria so any Briton wanting consular help would need to find consular services elsewhere in the region.
Asked whether the government would be rushing to bring home people such as Ms Begum, he said: "I'm not putting at risk British people's lives to go and look for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state."
He added that while the UK had a duty of care to children of Britons in Syria, he also had a duty towards all UK citizens and would do what was "proportionate and necessary" to keep people safe.
Sir Peter Fahy, a retired senior police chief who led the Prevent terrorism prevention programme at the time the girls ran away, said if Ms Begum did return to the UK, the authorities would first detain her and investigate whether there was enough evidence to mount a prosecution.
He said he could understand why the government was "not particularly interested" in facilitating her return.
"If the woman was showing complete remorse, it would be completely different," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
He said it would cost a "vast amount of money" and the biggest challenge would be for local police to keep her safe.
They would have to ensure she did not become a lightning rod for both right-wing extremists and Islamic extremists and did not try justify her position and actions, he added.
IS has lost control of most of the territory it overran, including its strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.
However, fighting continues in north-eastern Syria, where the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) say they captured dozens of foreign fighters in recent weeks.

Aside from her still being pretty cool with IS and then wanting to come home because it happens to suit her at this particular moment and not for any ideological reason, I think the comment regarding her becoming a lightning rod for extremists is valid even if she wanted to live a quiet and civilised life here; amongst the far right she'd be a confirmation that we welcome foreign elements harmful to our society with open arms and give them a nice warm bed to sleep in. As it is, the facts of the matter are that she'd still be in Syria with the rest of IS if they were winning, she stayed in Syria even after her second kid died of malnutrition, and if she brings her third kid here it seems pretty likely that she'd want to raise him as her little jihadist, after all, why would anyone completely voluntarily join up with IS if they didn't fancy the sound of a jihad.

Had she been an older and wiser person who regretted her actions and has been fending for her life the moment she entered Syria and tried to leave as quickly as she could then I'd be sympathetic to her plight. As it is she seems to be the perfect example for far-right organisations to base their crusades on.

If there's some legal obligation for her to come home then a jail term and permanent loss of custody of her child plus no further contact seems like the price she should pay (partly based on the logic that she came back for her child's sake). That fixes the problem of the far-right as well as her spreading her values particularly to her child.
 
Last edited:

cytg111

Lifer
Mar 17, 2008
23,049
12,719
136
Evaluate if she is a sociopath, if so, permantent facility living quarters and appropiate anti psych drugs for her.
 

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
37,734
18,004
146
That's a fair point (I acknowledge you said "at best" as well), I was worried that my full feelings on the topic were over-the-top.

The ability to have no reaction to grotesque, violent acts is something that most of us don't have.
 

feralkid

Lifer
Jan 28, 2002
16,399
4,457
136
Evaluate if she is a sociopath, if so, permantent facility living quarters and appropiate anti psych drugs for her.

Being a sociopath or psychopath are not really psychiatric diagnoses, nor do they call for any mandatory treatment.

It's usually referred to as an anti-social personality disorder, and most people with it walk among us, neither diagnosed or treated.
 

UglyCasanova

Lifer
Mar 25, 2001
19,275
1,361
126
She essentially is a member of isis now. If the UK let’s her back in that would be allowing a known threat back, I’d be pissed if I were their citizens.
 

Monk5127

Member
Mar 22, 2015
98
6
71
In leaving the UK to join ISIS in their fight against the civilised World she has rejected everything that western society stands for. She should be left to die in the desert with the rest of the ISIS dogs.
 

interchange

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
8,015
2,845
136
For what it's worth, my understanding (although not a child or forensic psychiatrist) is that frankly sociopathic stuff in adolescence usually doesn't portend sociopathy after age ~25 when the frontal lobes have matured. There simply isn't a way to definitively assess what you guys are interested in.
 

ecogen

Golden Member
Dec 24, 2016
1,217
1,288
136
Bring her back, take her kid away, ship her back to Syria/Iraq to face trial.
 

Jaskalas

Lifer
Jun 23, 2004
33,382
7,445
136
Her vowed support for ISIS' crimes against humanity speaks volumes. If she were intelligent she'd at least try to hide her murderous ambition. But as it stands, she's a simpleton who still wants street cred with genocidal terrorists. I don't know what rehab / treatment facilities the UK has, but I recon a solid 10 years in one of those.... minimum.

And zero custody rights.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
12,974
7,891
136
Legally though, what can be done? I don't favour just ignoring laws when there's a difficult case. Crucial point is she remains a UK citizen. I don't like the idea of her walking among us again, but the rule of law is important.

The law probably should have been made a long time ago such that what she did was defined clearly as a crime, with well-defined consequences, but it's not clear to me what the law says now.

If the Kurds choose to put her on trial and they can find evidence she broke the laws there, I suppose that would be a solution of sorts, but it would have to be a fair trial.

Maybe she'll have to be allowed back and we'll have to spend a fortune keeping an eye on her for the rest of her life (like with the Jamie Bulger killers?)

And while she seems to be a pretty warped person, (a) we have plenty of nasty people, that's not unprecedented, and (b) I do kind of blame the parents. For all those mini-jihadis who went over there they had to be partly 'primed' by their parents - no way do very young people just get magically 'radicalised' via the internet if they are bought up right in the first place. She was still a child when she went there.

This case bothered me at the time - how many have been jailed for planning to join ISIS? (but of course the PKK is an enemy of Turkey, our not-at-all-undemocratic, not-at-all-untrustworthy NATO ally, so it's entirely different, right?)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...-to-join-fight-against-islamic-state-in-syria
 

Jhhnn

IN MEMORIAM
Nov 11, 1999
62,365
14,681
136
She essentially is a member of isis now. If the UK let’s her back in that would be allowing a known threat back, I’d be pissed if I were their citizens.

The notion that a country should deny entry to one of their own citizens is wrong.
 

WelshBloke

Lifer
Jan 12, 2005
30,337
7,987
136
Let her back in, and then charge her for her crimes.
Thats what looks like happening if she makes her way back. Gov has ssid they aren't going to offer her any assistance getting back.

Personally I think that shes our problem and we should deal with it. Shes still a UK citizen. Bring her back and put her on trial and if a foreign country wants her extradited then the usual rules should apply.
 
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zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,512
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She essentially is a member of isis now. If the UK let’s her back in that would be allowing a known threat back, I’d be pissed if I were their citizens.

I think it would be valuable to bring her back purely for evaluation purposes. Keep her permanently locked in facility and subject to major psyc evaluations and data collecting for the rest of her life, if necessary. She's actually more valuable as a "know your enemy" than a "fuck off let 'em die" meatbag for personal revenge. It's always better to get a handle on your enemy's motivations and desires rather than just assume they are fundamentally wrong, at every level, simply because they aren't you.

Or, you know, you can just stick with the strategy that only ever guarantees permanent war.

It is also not lost on me that the US rightwing has held a permanent fixation on the moment that Obama ordered a strike on the Goebbel's of Al Qaeda, who had long ago defected, but was still technically a US citizen. It was demanded, universally on the right, that he should have been given due process. I find it interesting that in essentially this same example, there is very little sympathy for this woman, and certainly no desire to see her submitted to proper justice, as the right tends to demand. I often wonder if the right only cared about a traitorous, American-murdering terrorist being killed by drone because it was something that Obama ordered. I wonder if that is all that was?
 

interchange

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
8,015
2,845
136
I think it would be valuable to bring her back purely for evaluation purposes. Keep her permanently locked in facility and subject to major psyc evaluations and data collecting for the rest of her life, if necessary. She's actually more valuable as a "know your enemy" than a "fuck off let 'em die" meatbag for personal revenge. It's always better to get a handle on your enemy's motivations and desires rather than just assume they are fundamentally wrong, at every level, simply because they aren't you.

Or, you know, you can just stick with the strategy that only ever guarantees permanent war.

It is also not lost on me that the US rightwing has held a permanent fixation on the moment that Obama ordered a strike on the Goebbel's of Al Qaeda, who had long ago defected, but was still technically a US citizen. It was demanded, universally on the right, that he should have been given due process. I find it interesting that in essentially this same example, there is very little sympathy for this woman, and certainly no desire to see her submitted to proper justice, as the right tends to demand. I often wonder if the right only cared about a traitorous, American-murdering terrorist being killed by drone because it was something that Obama ordered. I wonder if that is all that was?

So an indefinite detainment under... What legal grounds exactly?
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,512
29,099
146
So an indefinite detainment under... What legal grounds exactly?

Hell if I know...I'm sure MI5, MI6, CIA, FBI, Mossad, etc would be super interested to learn everything they can from her, and I do believe they are all sharing some of our CIA's various black sights around the world, no? I know I'm being silly there, but the fact is that she really is a valuable resource into learning about ISIS recruiting methods and the profiles of people that get involved in this way, especially those, seemingly like her, that remain true believers after everything. She would be a gold mine for psyc intel.