A lawyer representing Shamima Begum’s family has suggested the UK will eventually give in to calls by the incoming Donald Trump administration to allow the “ISIS bride” to be repatriated.
Mohammed Tasnime Akunjee, said that Trump’s team is keen to withdraw funding for detention camps for ISIS members in the country, and that British citizens remaining there is a “barrier” to that goal.
He said foreign secretary David Lammy and prime minister Sir Keir Starmer “flip flop on policy all day long”, adding that Lammy “had previously supported Shamima Begum’s right to be repatriated” before changing his stance after entering office.
Akunjee suggested the UK could change course once again, despite Lammy initially dismissing calls by Trump’s incoming counter-terrorism chief Sebastian Gorka for Britain to repatriate its citizens in these camps.
“I don’t think the UK is in a position, nor has it been for a long time, to stand up to the US’s demands,” he told Yahoo News.
US pressures UK to allow return of ISIS members
In an interview with the Times, Gorka said that any nation which wishes to be seen as a “serious ally” of the US should accept the repatriation of its citizens who went to join the so-called Islamic State.
“Any nation which wishes to be seen to be a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment,” he said.
“That is doubly so for the UK which has a very special place in President Trump’s heart and we would all wish to see the ‘special relationship’ fully re-established.”
It follows the rapid fall of Bashar Assad’s regime to the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, with the potential for instability in the region putting the future of the camps holding IS-linked prisoners in doubt.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the anti-Assad group allied with the West, has been guarding tens of thousands of captured foreign IS members and their children in sprawling camps and detention centres.
But the recent upheaval is forcing the SDF to renegotiate with the various players in Syria’s long and bloody civil war, which could end in violence and may threaten the Kurd’s ability to hold these prisoners.
Even in 2021, long before Assad’s downfall, Trump was “quite clear that he wanted all countries to take responsibility for their citizens who are in those camps,” said Akunjee, who advised the families of three schoolgirls who left east London for ISIS-controlled Syria in 2015.
“The US funds the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDS) camps and I imagine they wouldn’t want to continue doing that if they don’t have to.
“The SDS are actually Marxist-Communists, so it’s interesting that the US offered their support. I don’t think that was anything but a relationship of convenience and I think that convenience has probably run out,” he added.
Given that Trump’s team “haven’t been particularly kind towards the Starmer camp” on a number of issues, and that the UK is “eager to negotiate” with the SDF, he believes the UK will eventually agree to Trump’s demands.
Shamima Begum ‘not coming back to UK’, Lammy says
The foreign secretary said the government would “always put British security interests first and the safeguarding of our population,” when asked about Gorka’s demands.
“Shamima Begum will not be coming back to the UK. It’s gone right through the courts. She’s not a UK national,” he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain. “We will not be bringing her back to the UK. We’re really clear about that.”
Begum was just 15 when she travelled from Bethnal Green, east London, into territory controlled by IS in 2015 and was “married off” to an IS fighter.
Begum, now 25, was stripped of her citizenship by the Home Office in 2019. Critics of the decision say it has rendered Begum de facto stateless, but a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in February 2020 said she was “a citizen of Bangladesh by descent”. She now lives in the al-Roj detention camp in north eastern Syria.
“We will act in our security interests. And many of those in those camps are dangerous, are radicals,” said Lammy.
“Some of them, if they were to return to the UK, “would have to be, frankly, jailed as soon as they arrived”, he added.
‘Begum is our responsibility and UK should deal with her’, critics say
Allowing Begum’s return to the UK, and most likely prosecuting her, is exactly what many lawyers, campaigners and politicians have made the case for, arguing doing so would be safer in the long run.
Tory MP David Davis, who has been banging the drum on this issue for years, wrote on X: “Trump’s counterterrorism chief is right.
“The UK should allow Shamima Begum, and others like her, to return to the UK from Northern Syria. They are our responsibility. We are creating a problem for tomorrow, by avoiding one today.”
Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s Refugee and Migrant Rights Director, said Lammy has “got this totally wrong” and that the “UK is responsible for its citizens just as other countries are responsible for theirs.
“There is no real prospect of security for anyone in a world where governments are permitted to merely cast off their own nationals when they deem it politically convenient rather than following a due process of investigation and prosecution of any offences those nationals may have committed,” he said.
In February 2023, Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism laws, warned the camp holding Begum could become “Britain’s Guantanamo” if she and other women detained there were now allowed home.
He said this could become an “exploitable grievance” among groups and that children in the camps are at risk of radicalisation by Islamic extremists.
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