It is a fascinating story that gets you thinking about the age of responsibility, the nature of citizenship, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the fate of individuals who joined extremist groups.
In this episode, we'll be talking about Shamima Begum, a young lady who had her British citizenship revoked after leaving the country to join the Islamic State.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a young British lady.
[00:00:26] Or to be precise, a young lady who used to be British, but had her British citizenship revoked, taken away, after leaving the country to join the Islamic State.
[00:00:38] It's a fascinating story that gets you thinking about the age of responsibility, the nature of citizenship, and more, so I hope it’ll be an interesting one.
[00:00:47] OK then, Shamima Begum, ISIS Teenage Bride.
[00:00:54] Let me start this episode by asking you to do something for me.
[00:00:59] Think, for a minute, about the biggest mistake you ever made as a teenager.
[00:01:05] Was there something you did that, when you think about it today, it fills you with pain and regret? Something you think about and think “Ah, I can’t believe I was so stupid to have done that?”
[00:01:18] Perhaps it was something truly terrible, a decision that you made that irrevocably changed your life and took you in a completely different direction.
[00:01:28] Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to tell me what it was, just think for a moment about what it might have been.
[00:01:35] Whatever it was, let me tell you about one teenage decision that I am certain was worse, or at least had more lasting and most certainly irreversible consequences.
[00:01:48] In February of 2015, a British-born teenage girl called Shamima Begum decided to bunk off school with a pair of her friends.
[00:02:00] To be precise, she didn’t just bunk off school, skip school for the day, she ran away from her hometown of London, got on a plane first to Turkey and was then smuggled over the border to Syria, where she joined the Islamic State.
[00:02:16] She was only 15 years old at the time.
[00:02:21] In the weeks and months that followed, British politicians spoke publicly about their hope for a safe return for the girls, saying that they hoped that the so-called “ISIS trio” would come to their senses and return home to Britain.
[00:02:36] They were too young, they said, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were just kids.
[00:02:42] But, there was no sign of them.
[00:02:45] In fact, the girls had no intention of returning, and their families wouldn’t hear from them for several years.
[00:02:55] It would later transpire that within 10 days of arriving, Shamima Begum was married off to a Dutch man who had become radicalised and joined ISIS.
[00:03:06] Despite her young age, Shamima reportedly developed a reputation as something of an enforcer, making sure that other ISIS wives adhered to the strictest religious standards, and even trying to recruit more young women from back home in Britain to come to Syria to join the Islamic State.
[00:03:28] Now, you probably need little reminder about the barbarism of the Islamic State, but let me give you a very brief one.
[00:03:37] It was a fundamentalist Islamic group of varied origins that gained global recognition after its militants gained control over large amounts of northwestern Iraq and Eastern Syria in 2014.
[00:03:52] Fighters flocked to join the so-called caliphate from all over the world, including several thousand radicalised individuals from Europe.
[00:04:01] And, as I'm sure you will remember, ISIS was known for its brutality and oppression: horrific punishments, mass executions and beheadings, destruction of culturally important monuments, extreme violence, and suicide attacks.
[00:04:19] It purported to be some kind of paradise based on pure Islamic beliefs, but the reality was clearly very different.
[00:04:29] Shamima Begum, by all accounts, felt immediately at home, at least for a few years. She was happy, she said, it was like everything she'd hoped for and seen in the ISIS propaganda videos.
[00:04:43] Then in February of 2019, four years after arriving, something changed.
[00:04:51] She turned up in a refugee camp in Northern Syria, discovered by a British war correspondent.
[00:04:59] Begum, so it would seem, had changed her mind.
[00:05:03] She wanted to come home to Britain.
[00:05:06] She gave an interview with the BBC in which she revealed that she had had two children, both of whom had died in their infancy.
[00:05:15] And she was 9 months pregnant with a third.
[00:05:19] She wanted to return to Britain for the sake of her unborn child.
[00:05:24] A refugee camp was no place for a baby, nor was the crumbling Islamic State, and after already losing two children, she was prepared to do anything to save the life of the third.
[00:05:37] She had changed her mind, she said, and she wanted to come home.
[00:05:43] Well, she did want to come home, but she hadn’t completely changed her mind about ISIS and her beliefs; in the interview she didn’t accept any responsibility for her actions, and was still expressing sympathy for the Islamic State.
[00:06:00] When the news broke, it was all over the front pages. The Times website, which broke the story, crashed after publishing the story with the headline “Bring Me Home”.
[00:06:14] And then something very strange happened.
[00:06:18] The day after the news of her discovery was published, the British Home Secretary, a top member of the government, revoked her citizenship, he said that she was no longer a British citizen, and therefore she had no right to come to Britain.
[00:06:36] Suddenly this 19-year-old woman was stateless, she had no passport, no country to call her own.
[00:06:45] Now, for the absence of doubt, and putting aside whatever you might think about her beliefs and actions, Shamima Begum was legally British.
[00:06:55] She was born in London, her father was from Bangladesh but he had something called “indefinite leave to remain”.
[00:07:03] This meant that Begum was legally a British citizen, just like any other, but she found her citizenship stripped from her.
[00:07:13] And again, on a legal basis, the British state does have the right to remove someone’s citizenship.
[00:07:21] In this case, the Home Secretary did it on the grounds of national security.
[00:07:27] He said that she had done something so terrible, she had pledged her allegiance to a regime that was so abhorrent, with beliefs so contrary to British beliefs, that she had forfeited her right to British citizenship.
[00:07:42] She was not welcome in Britain, the Home Secretary said, it was no longer her home, and he would not let her return here.
[00:07:52] This was in February of 2019, and to this day, as of the time of recording this episode at least, the situation has not changed; she is still in a Syrian refugee camp, without a state to call her own.
[00:08:08] To some, this is fair and just; nationhood and citizenship are things that a country can give out and take away, and in the case of Shamima Begum, she made her choice, she knew what she was doing, and she pledged loyalty to a state so horrific that it is perfectly justified that she forfeited her right to call herself British.
[00:08:34] To others, it is a deeply unfair decision against a young woman who didn’t fully understand what she was doing, who made a teenage mistake and has already suffered greatly.
[00:08:46] Removing her citizenship is not only unnecessary and overly punitive, it is also illegal.
[00:08:54] So, to begin with, let’s explore the first position, the position of the British government, that Shamima Begum has forfeited her right to British citizenship.
[00:09:07] As you heard, the day after her first interview with the BBC, the Home Secretary publicly declared that her passport had been revoked.
[00:09:16] The British government's position hinges on a few key points.
[00:09:22] Firstly, there is the argument of national security.
[00:09:27] The Home Secretary, in revoking Shamima Begum's citizenship, implied that her return could pose a threat to the security of the country. She had been in ISIS for 4 years, with reports about her being actively involved in the day-to-day operations.
[00:09:46] She would later deny that she was anything more than a housewife, but not everyone was buying this, not everyone believed her.
[00:09:54] What’s more, she only left the caliphate after the Islamic State started to fall, and her first interviews seemed to show that she still believed in ISIS and showed no remorse for its actions or her actions by joining it.
[00:10:11] If she were to return to the UK, so the argument goes, it’s highly probable that she would radicalise others, help terrorist networks in the country, or at least be held up as a poster girl for Islamic terrorism.
[00:10:27] Secondly, there's the legal aspect. You might think that it is illegal for a country to simply decide that one of its citizens is no longer a citizen, and it is in most cases, but there are some exceptions.
[00:10:43] One of these is if the person concerned won’t be stateless, so if they have another nationality.
[00:10:51] In Begum's case, it was initially argued that she could claim citizenship in Bangladesh through her parents, who were both Bangladeshi by birth.
[00:11:02] But Bangladesh has rejected her outright, saying that she has no right to Bangladeshi citizenship, and if she attempted to enter the country, she would face the death penalty, due to the country’s zero-tolerance policy towards terrorism.
[00:11:19] Bangladesh says it has nothing to do with her; she was born in Britain, it’s where she lived her entire life before going to Syria, she had British citizenship, it has no interest in her and she is Britain’s problem.
[00:11:35] In fact, she had even claimed that she was looking into obtaining Dutch citizenship through her husband, an ISIS fighter but technically a Dutch citizen, but the Dutch government has basically said “no way”.
[00:11:50] Clearly, for Shamima Begum, she is in this strange diplomatic vacuum, rejected by her country of birth, rejected by both countries that she could have some claim to be a citizen of, and stuck in a Syrian refugee camp.
[00:12:07] And, to take the other side of the argument for a moment, this is deeply unfair.
[00:12:13] Citizenship is a fundamental human right, not a privilege to be withdrawn, and Britain needs to take responsibility for her. She was British, she was radicalised in Britain. Leaving her to rot in a Syrian refugee camp is deeply unfair and sets a dangerous precedent, allowing the government to revoke citizenship based on certain criteria.
[00:12:39] What’s more, she was 15 when she left. Legally, she was still a child. We all make mistakes when we’re 15.
[00:12:48] Sure, we don’t all join the Islamic State, but she was a child and this should be taken into consideration.
[00:12:57] As a child, should the fault be put squarely on her, or on those who groomed or radicalised her?
[00:13:05] Yes, she made a mistake, and yes, it was a really bad mistake.
[00:13:10] But once she had made the decision to get on that plane to Turkey, and then get smuggled over the border, there was nothing more that she could have done to get out. She couldn’t really have run away, as that would have meant risking her life; if she'd been caught, she would undoubtedly have been put in prison, tortured and perhaps executed.
[00:13:33] Yes, she was there for 4 years, but she barely left the home, she wasn’t fighting on the frontlines.
[00:13:39] Or at least, she says she wasn’t.
[00:13:43] And what’s more, she suffered terribly.
[00:13:46] She fell pregnant five times, lost two babies during the pregnancies, and all three of her surviving children died. She was abused by her husband, so she says, she saw her friends killed, she has already experienced more than enough heartbreak and anguish, and she is still only in her early 20s.
[00:14:09] Bring her back to Britain to face justice here, some people say.
[00:14:15] Of course, she should pay for her actions, but it is much better to bring her back to her home country to face trial rather than leave her in a refugee camp with hundreds of other former ISIS members, where she will remain as radical as ever, and might easily escape.
[00:14:34] In other words, perhaps counterintuitively, she poses a greater threat to Britain in an insecure refugee camp in Syria than she would safely behind bars in a British prison or under the careful watch of the police back in London.
[00:14:51] Whatever side you are more inclined to take, it's undeniable that Shamima Begum doesn’t seem to be doing herself any favours through the TV interviews that she's given.
[00:15:01] Especially during the early interviews, from 2019, she showed no remorse whatsoever and continued to show sympathy for ISIS's values and beliefs.
[00:15:14] She even sort of boasted that she'd seen beheaded heads in the bin, the severed heads of enemy fighters. And when the journalist asked her what that felt like, she said that it didn’t “faze her at all”, she wasn’t bothered by it.
[00:15:31] Perhaps this just shows naivety, that she grossly misunderstood what might happen, and simply assumed that she could click her fingers and come “home” to Britain, and she got a nasty shock when she discovered that it was not going to be easy at all.
[00:15:49] Now, we've been speaking only about Shamima Begum today, but clearly she is just one example. Thousands of people left their European homes to join the Islamic State, and many are now holed up in refugee camps.
[00:16:05] What should happen to them?
[00:16:08] Of course, nobody is suggesting that they receive some kind of hero’s welcome, but should they be deprived of their citizenship and left in permanent exile or should they be returned to their country of origin?
[00:16:23] And if they are returned, what happens next?
[00:16:27] How can you go from living under ISIS rule to living in a Western democracy?
[00:16:33] If the answer is “you can’t”, then what is the answer?
[00:16:39] As the story of Shamima Begum shows, there are no easy answers, and while the Islamic State itself might now be toppled, the problem of what to do with its former citizens is far from solved.
[00:16:55] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Shamima Begum.
[00:16:59] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:17:03] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:06] Are there stories of similar young girls from your country who ran away to join ISIS? What is happening to them now, and what is the policy of your government towards former ISIS fighters?
[00:17:18] Do you think it's ever right and reasonable for someone to be stripped of their citizenship?
[00:17:23] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:27] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a young British lady.
[00:00:26] Or to be precise, a young lady who used to be British, but had her British citizenship revoked, taken away, after leaving the country to join the Islamic State.
[00:00:38] It's a fascinating story that gets you thinking about the age of responsibility, the nature of citizenship, and more, so I hope it’ll be an interesting one.
[00:00:47] OK then, Shamima Begum, ISIS Teenage Bride.
[00:00:54] Let me start this episode by asking you to do something for me.
[00:00:59] Think, for a minute, about the biggest mistake you ever made as a teenager.
[00:01:05] Was there something you did that, when you think about it today, it fills you with pain and regret? Something you think about and think “Ah, I can’t believe I was so stupid to have done that?”
[00:01:18] Perhaps it was something truly terrible, a decision that you made that irrevocably changed your life and took you in a completely different direction.
[00:01:28] Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to tell me what it was, just think for a moment about what it might have been.
[00:01:35] Whatever it was, let me tell you about one teenage decision that I am certain was worse, or at least had more lasting and most certainly irreversible consequences.
[00:01:48] In February of 2015, a British-born teenage girl called Shamima Begum decided to bunk off school with a pair of her friends.
[00:02:00] To be precise, she didn’t just bunk off school, skip school for the day, she ran away from her hometown of London, got on a plane first to Turkey and was then smuggled over the border to Syria, where she joined the Islamic State.
[00:02:16] She was only 15 years old at the time.
[00:02:21] In the weeks and months that followed, British politicians spoke publicly about their hope for a safe return for the girls, saying that they hoped that the so-called “ISIS trio” would come to their senses and return home to Britain.
[00:02:36] They were too young, they said, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were just kids.
[00:02:42] But, there was no sign of them.
[00:02:45] In fact, the girls had no intention of returning, and their families wouldn’t hear from them for several years.
[00:02:55] It would later transpire that within 10 days of arriving, Shamima Begum was married off to a Dutch man who had become radicalised and joined ISIS.
[00:03:06] Despite her young age, Shamima reportedly developed a reputation as something of an enforcer, making sure that other ISIS wives adhered to the strictest religious standards, and even trying to recruit more young women from back home in Britain to come to Syria to join the Islamic State.
[00:03:28] Now, you probably need little reminder about the barbarism of the Islamic State, but let me give you a very brief one.
[00:03:37] It was a fundamentalist Islamic group of varied origins that gained global recognition after its militants gained control over large amounts of northwestern Iraq and Eastern Syria in 2014.
[00:03:52] Fighters flocked to join the so-called caliphate from all over the world, including several thousand radicalised individuals from Europe.
[00:04:01] And, as I'm sure you will remember, ISIS was known for its brutality and oppression: horrific punishments, mass executions and beheadings, destruction of culturally important monuments, extreme violence, and suicide attacks.
[00:04:19] It purported to be some kind of paradise based on pure Islamic beliefs, but the reality was clearly very different.
[00:04:29] Shamima Begum, by all accounts, felt immediately at home, at least for a few years. She was happy, she said, it was like everything she'd hoped for and seen in the ISIS propaganda videos.
[00:04:43] Then in February of 2019, four years after arriving, something changed.
[00:04:51] She turned up in a refugee camp in Northern Syria, discovered by a British war correspondent.
[00:04:59] Begum, so it would seem, had changed her mind.
[00:05:03] She wanted to come home to Britain.
[00:05:06] She gave an interview with the BBC in which she revealed that she had had two children, both of whom had died in their infancy.
[00:05:15] And she was 9 months pregnant with a third.
[00:05:19] She wanted to return to Britain for the sake of her unborn child.
[00:05:24] A refugee camp was no place for a baby, nor was the crumbling Islamic State, and after already losing two children, she was prepared to do anything to save the life of the third.
[00:05:37] She had changed her mind, she said, and she wanted to come home.
[00:05:43] Well, she did want to come home, but she hadn’t completely changed her mind about ISIS and her beliefs; in the interview she didn’t accept any responsibility for her actions, and was still expressing sympathy for the Islamic State.
[00:06:00] When the news broke, it was all over the front pages. The Times website, which broke the story, crashed after publishing the story with the headline “Bring Me Home”.
[00:06:14] And then something very strange happened.
[00:06:18] The day after the news of her discovery was published, the British Home Secretary, a top member of the government, revoked her citizenship, he said that she was no longer a British citizen, and therefore she had no right to come to Britain.
[00:06:36] Suddenly this 19-year-old woman was stateless, she had no passport, no country to call her own.
[00:06:45] Now, for the absence of doubt, and putting aside whatever you might think about her beliefs and actions, Shamima Begum was legally British.
[00:06:55] She was born in London, her father was from Bangladesh but he had something called “indefinite leave to remain”.
[00:07:03] This meant that Begum was legally a British citizen, just like any other, but she found her citizenship stripped from her.
[00:07:13] And again, on a legal basis, the British state does have the right to remove someone’s citizenship.
[00:07:21] In this case, the Home Secretary did it on the grounds of national security.
[00:07:27] He said that she had done something so terrible, she had pledged her allegiance to a regime that was so abhorrent, with beliefs so contrary to British beliefs, that she had forfeited her right to British citizenship.
[00:07:42] She was not welcome in Britain, the Home Secretary said, it was no longer her home, and he would not let her return here.
[00:07:52] This was in February of 2019, and to this day, as of the time of recording this episode at least, the situation has not changed; she is still in a Syrian refugee camp, without a state to call her own.
[00:08:08] To some, this is fair and just; nationhood and citizenship are things that a country can give out and take away, and in the case of Shamima Begum, she made her choice, she knew what she was doing, and she pledged loyalty to a state so horrific that it is perfectly justified that she forfeited her right to call herself British.
[00:08:34] To others, it is a deeply unfair decision against a young woman who didn’t fully understand what she was doing, who made a teenage mistake and has already suffered greatly.
[00:08:46] Removing her citizenship is not only unnecessary and overly punitive, it is also illegal.
[00:08:54] So, to begin with, let’s explore the first position, the position of the British government, that Shamima Begum has forfeited her right to British citizenship.
[00:09:07] As you heard, the day after her first interview with the BBC, the Home Secretary publicly declared that her passport had been revoked.
[00:09:16] The British government's position hinges on a few key points.
[00:09:22] Firstly, there is the argument of national security.
[00:09:27] The Home Secretary, in revoking Shamima Begum's citizenship, implied that her return could pose a threat to the security of the country. She had been in ISIS for 4 years, with reports about her being actively involved in the day-to-day operations.
[00:09:46] She would later deny that she was anything more than a housewife, but not everyone was buying this, not everyone believed her.
[00:09:54] What’s more, she only left the caliphate after the Islamic State started to fall, and her first interviews seemed to show that she still believed in ISIS and showed no remorse for its actions or her actions by joining it.
[00:10:11] If she were to return to the UK, so the argument goes, it’s highly probable that she would radicalise others, help terrorist networks in the country, or at least be held up as a poster girl for Islamic terrorism.
[00:10:27] Secondly, there's the legal aspect. You might think that it is illegal for a country to simply decide that one of its citizens is no longer a citizen, and it is in most cases, but there are some exceptions.
[00:10:43] One of these is if the person concerned won’t be stateless, so if they have another nationality.
[00:10:51] In Begum's case, it was initially argued that she could claim citizenship in Bangladesh through her parents, who were both Bangladeshi by birth.
[00:11:02] But Bangladesh has rejected her outright, saying that she has no right to Bangladeshi citizenship, and if she attempted to enter the country, she would face the death penalty, due to the country’s zero-tolerance policy towards terrorism.
[00:11:19] Bangladesh says it has nothing to do with her; she was born in Britain, it’s where she lived her entire life before going to Syria, she had British citizenship, it has no interest in her and she is Britain’s problem.
[00:11:35] In fact, she had even claimed that she was looking into obtaining Dutch citizenship through her husband, an ISIS fighter but technically a Dutch citizen, but the Dutch government has basically said “no way”.
[00:11:50] Clearly, for Shamima Begum, she is in this strange diplomatic vacuum, rejected by her country of birth, rejected by both countries that she could have some claim to be a citizen of, and stuck in a Syrian refugee camp.
[00:12:07] And, to take the other side of the argument for a moment, this is deeply unfair.
[00:12:13] Citizenship is a fundamental human right, not a privilege to be withdrawn, and Britain needs to take responsibility for her. She was British, she was radicalised in Britain. Leaving her to rot in a Syrian refugee camp is deeply unfair and sets a dangerous precedent, allowing the government to revoke citizenship based on certain criteria.
[00:12:39] What’s more, she was 15 when she left. Legally, she was still a child. We all make mistakes when we’re 15.
[00:12:48] Sure, we don’t all join the Islamic State, but she was a child and this should be taken into consideration.
[00:12:57] As a child, should the fault be put squarely on her, or on those who groomed or radicalised her?
[00:13:05] Yes, she made a mistake, and yes, it was a really bad mistake.
[00:13:10] But once she had made the decision to get on that plane to Turkey, and then get smuggled over the border, there was nothing more that she could have done to get out. She couldn’t really have run away, as that would have meant risking her life; if she'd been caught, she would undoubtedly have been put in prison, tortured and perhaps executed.
[00:13:33] Yes, she was there for 4 years, but she barely left the home, she wasn’t fighting on the frontlines.
[00:13:39] Or at least, she says she wasn’t.
[00:13:43] And what’s more, she suffered terribly.
[00:13:46] She fell pregnant five times, lost two babies during the pregnancies, and all three of her surviving children died. She was abused by her husband, so she says, she saw her friends killed, she has already experienced more than enough heartbreak and anguish, and she is still only in her early 20s.
[00:14:09] Bring her back to Britain to face justice here, some people say.
[00:14:15] Of course, she should pay for her actions, but it is much better to bring her back to her home country to face trial rather than leave her in a refugee camp with hundreds of other former ISIS members, where she will remain as radical as ever, and might easily escape.
[00:14:34] In other words, perhaps counterintuitively, she poses a greater threat to Britain in an insecure refugee camp in Syria than she would safely behind bars in a British prison or under the careful watch of the police back in London.
[00:14:51] Whatever side you are more inclined to take, it's undeniable that Shamima Begum doesn’t seem to be doing herself any favours through the TV interviews that she's given.
[00:15:01] Especially during the early interviews, from 2019, she showed no remorse whatsoever and continued to show sympathy for ISIS's values and beliefs.
[00:15:14] She even sort of boasted that she'd seen beheaded heads in the bin, the severed heads of enemy fighters. And when the journalist asked her what that felt like, she said that it didn’t “faze her at all”, she wasn’t bothered by it.
[00:15:31] Perhaps this just shows naivety, that she grossly misunderstood what might happen, and simply assumed that she could click her fingers and come “home” to Britain, and she got a nasty shock when she discovered that it was not going to be easy at all.
[00:15:49] Now, we've been speaking only about Shamima Begum today, but clearly she is just one example. Thousands of people left their European homes to join the Islamic State, and many are now holed up in refugee camps.
[00:16:05] What should happen to them?
[00:16:08] Of course, nobody is suggesting that they receive some kind of hero’s welcome, but should they be deprived of their citizenship and left in permanent exile or should they be returned to their country of origin?
[00:16:23] And if they are returned, what happens next?
[00:16:27] How can you go from living under ISIS rule to living in a Western democracy?
[00:16:33] If the answer is “you can’t”, then what is the answer?
[00:16:39] As the story of Shamima Begum shows, there are no easy answers, and while the Islamic State itself might now be toppled, the problem of what to do with its former citizens is far from solved.
[00:16:55] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Shamima Begum.
[00:16:59] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:17:03] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:06] Are there stories of similar young girls from your country who ran away to join ISIS? What is happening to them now, and what is the policy of your government towards former ISIS fighters?
[00:17:18] Do you think it's ever right and reasonable for someone to be stripped of their citizenship?
[00:17:23] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:27] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a young British lady.
[00:00:26] Or to be precise, a young lady who used to be British, but had her British citizenship revoked, taken away, after leaving the country to join the Islamic State.
[00:00:38] It's a fascinating story that gets you thinking about the age of responsibility, the nature of citizenship, and more, so I hope it’ll be an interesting one.
[00:00:47] OK then, Shamima Begum, ISIS Teenage Bride.
[00:00:54] Let me start this episode by asking you to do something for me.
[00:00:59] Think, for a minute, about the biggest mistake you ever made as a teenager.
[00:01:05] Was there something you did that, when you think about it today, it fills you with pain and regret? Something you think about and think “Ah, I can’t believe I was so stupid to have done that?”
[00:01:18] Perhaps it was something truly terrible, a decision that you made that irrevocably changed your life and took you in a completely different direction.
[00:01:28] Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to tell me what it was, just think for a moment about what it might have been.
[00:01:35] Whatever it was, let me tell you about one teenage decision that I am certain was worse, or at least had more lasting and most certainly irreversible consequences.
[00:01:48] In February of 2015, a British-born teenage girl called Shamima Begum decided to bunk off school with a pair of her friends.
[00:02:00] To be precise, she didn’t just bunk off school, skip school for the day, she ran away from her hometown of London, got on a plane first to Turkey and was then smuggled over the border to Syria, where she joined the Islamic State.
[00:02:16] She was only 15 years old at the time.
[00:02:21] In the weeks and months that followed, British politicians spoke publicly about their hope for a safe return for the girls, saying that they hoped that the so-called “ISIS trio” would come to their senses and return home to Britain.
[00:02:36] They were too young, they said, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were just kids.
[00:02:42] But, there was no sign of them.
[00:02:45] In fact, the girls had no intention of returning, and their families wouldn’t hear from them for several years.
[00:02:55] It would later transpire that within 10 days of arriving, Shamima Begum was married off to a Dutch man who had become radicalised and joined ISIS.
[00:03:06] Despite her young age, Shamima reportedly developed a reputation as something of an enforcer, making sure that other ISIS wives adhered to the strictest religious standards, and even trying to recruit more young women from back home in Britain to come to Syria to join the Islamic State.
[00:03:28] Now, you probably need little reminder about the barbarism of the Islamic State, but let me give you a very brief one.
[00:03:37] It was a fundamentalist Islamic group of varied origins that gained global recognition after its militants gained control over large amounts of northwestern Iraq and Eastern Syria in 2014.
[00:03:52] Fighters flocked to join the so-called caliphate from all over the world, including several thousand radicalised individuals from Europe.
[00:04:01] And, as I'm sure you will remember, ISIS was known for its brutality and oppression: horrific punishments, mass executions and beheadings, destruction of culturally important monuments, extreme violence, and suicide attacks.
[00:04:19] It purported to be some kind of paradise based on pure Islamic beliefs, but the reality was clearly very different.
[00:04:29] Shamima Begum, by all accounts, felt immediately at home, at least for a few years. She was happy, she said, it was like everything she'd hoped for and seen in the ISIS propaganda videos.
[00:04:43] Then in February of 2019, four years after arriving, something changed.
[00:04:51] She turned up in a refugee camp in Northern Syria, discovered by a British war correspondent.
[00:04:59] Begum, so it would seem, had changed her mind.
[00:05:03] She wanted to come home to Britain.
[00:05:06] She gave an interview with the BBC in which she revealed that she had had two children, both of whom had died in their infancy.
[00:05:15] And she was 9 months pregnant with a third.
[00:05:19] She wanted to return to Britain for the sake of her unborn child.
[00:05:24] A refugee camp was no place for a baby, nor was the crumbling Islamic State, and after already losing two children, she was prepared to do anything to save the life of the third.
[00:05:37] She had changed her mind, she said, and she wanted to come home.
[00:05:43] Well, she did want to come home, but she hadn’t completely changed her mind about ISIS and her beliefs; in the interview she didn’t accept any responsibility for her actions, and was still expressing sympathy for the Islamic State.
[00:06:00] When the news broke, it was all over the front pages. The Times website, which broke the story, crashed after publishing the story with the headline “Bring Me Home”.
[00:06:14] And then something very strange happened.
[00:06:18] The day after the news of her discovery was published, the British Home Secretary, a top member of the government, revoked her citizenship, he said that she was no longer a British citizen, and therefore she had no right to come to Britain.
[00:06:36] Suddenly this 19-year-old woman was stateless, she had no passport, no country to call her own.
[00:06:45] Now, for the absence of doubt, and putting aside whatever you might think about her beliefs and actions, Shamima Begum was legally British.
[00:06:55] She was born in London, her father was from Bangladesh but he had something called “indefinite leave to remain”.
[00:07:03] This meant that Begum was legally a British citizen, just like any other, but she found her citizenship stripped from her.
[00:07:13] And again, on a legal basis, the British state does have the right to remove someone’s citizenship.
[00:07:21] In this case, the Home Secretary did it on the grounds of national security.
[00:07:27] He said that she had done something so terrible, she had pledged her allegiance to a regime that was so abhorrent, with beliefs so contrary to British beliefs, that she had forfeited her right to British citizenship.
[00:07:42] She was not welcome in Britain, the Home Secretary said, it was no longer her home, and he would not let her return here.
[00:07:52] This was in February of 2019, and to this day, as of the time of recording this episode at least, the situation has not changed; she is still in a Syrian refugee camp, without a state to call her own.
[00:08:08] To some, this is fair and just; nationhood and citizenship are things that a country can give out and take away, and in the case of Shamima Begum, she made her choice, she knew what she was doing, and she pledged loyalty to a state so horrific that it is perfectly justified that she forfeited her right to call herself British.
[00:08:34] To others, it is a deeply unfair decision against a young woman who didn’t fully understand what she was doing, who made a teenage mistake and has already suffered greatly.
[00:08:46] Removing her citizenship is not only unnecessary and overly punitive, it is also illegal.
[00:08:54] So, to begin with, let’s explore the first position, the position of the British government, that Shamima Begum has forfeited her right to British citizenship.
[00:09:07] As you heard, the day after her first interview with the BBC, the Home Secretary publicly declared that her passport had been revoked.
[00:09:16] The British government's position hinges on a few key points.
[00:09:22] Firstly, there is the argument of national security.
[00:09:27] The Home Secretary, in revoking Shamima Begum's citizenship, implied that her return could pose a threat to the security of the country. She had been in ISIS for 4 years, with reports about her being actively involved in the day-to-day operations.
[00:09:46] She would later deny that she was anything more than a housewife, but not everyone was buying this, not everyone believed her.
[00:09:54] What’s more, she only left the caliphate after the Islamic State started to fall, and her first interviews seemed to show that she still believed in ISIS and showed no remorse for its actions or her actions by joining it.
[00:10:11] If she were to return to the UK, so the argument goes, it’s highly probable that she would radicalise others, help terrorist networks in the country, or at least be held up as a poster girl for Islamic terrorism.
[00:10:27] Secondly, there's the legal aspect. You might think that it is illegal for a country to simply decide that one of its citizens is no longer a citizen, and it is in most cases, but there are some exceptions.
[00:10:43] One of these is if the person concerned won’t be stateless, so if they have another nationality.
[00:10:51] In Begum's case, it was initially argued that she could claim citizenship in Bangladesh through her parents, who were both Bangladeshi by birth.
[00:11:02] But Bangladesh has rejected her outright, saying that she has no right to Bangladeshi citizenship, and if she attempted to enter the country, she would face the death penalty, due to the country’s zero-tolerance policy towards terrorism.
[00:11:19] Bangladesh says it has nothing to do with her; she was born in Britain, it’s where she lived her entire life before going to Syria, she had British citizenship, it has no interest in her and she is Britain’s problem.
[00:11:35] In fact, she had even claimed that she was looking into obtaining Dutch citizenship through her husband, an ISIS fighter but technically a Dutch citizen, but the Dutch government has basically said “no way”.
[00:11:50] Clearly, for Shamima Begum, she is in this strange diplomatic vacuum, rejected by her country of birth, rejected by both countries that she could have some claim to be a citizen of, and stuck in a Syrian refugee camp.
[00:12:07] And, to take the other side of the argument for a moment, this is deeply unfair.
[00:12:13] Citizenship is a fundamental human right, not a privilege to be withdrawn, and Britain needs to take responsibility for her. She was British, she was radicalised in Britain. Leaving her to rot in a Syrian refugee camp is deeply unfair and sets a dangerous precedent, allowing the government to revoke citizenship based on certain criteria.
[00:12:39] What’s more, she was 15 when she left. Legally, she was still a child. We all make mistakes when we’re 15.
[00:12:48] Sure, we don’t all join the Islamic State, but she was a child and this should be taken into consideration.
[00:12:57] As a child, should the fault be put squarely on her, or on those who groomed or radicalised her?
[00:13:05] Yes, she made a mistake, and yes, it was a really bad mistake.
[00:13:10] But once she had made the decision to get on that plane to Turkey, and then get smuggled over the border, there was nothing more that she could have done to get out. She couldn’t really have run away, as that would have meant risking her life; if she'd been caught, she would undoubtedly have been put in prison, tortured and perhaps executed.
[00:13:33] Yes, she was there for 4 years, but she barely left the home, she wasn’t fighting on the frontlines.
[00:13:39] Or at least, she says she wasn’t.
[00:13:43] And what’s more, she suffered terribly.
[00:13:46] She fell pregnant five times, lost two babies during the pregnancies, and all three of her surviving children died. She was abused by her husband, so she says, she saw her friends killed, she has already experienced more than enough heartbreak and anguish, and she is still only in her early 20s.
[00:14:09] Bring her back to Britain to face justice here, some people say.
[00:14:15] Of course, she should pay for her actions, but it is much better to bring her back to her home country to face trial rather than leave her in a refugee camp with hundreds of other former ISIS members, where she will remain as radical as ever, and might easily escape.
[00:14:34] In other words, perhaps counterintuitively, she poses a greater threat to Britain in an insecure refugee camp in Syria than she would safely behind bars in a British prison or under the careful watch of the police back in London.
[00:14:51] Whatever side you are more inclined to take, it's undeniable that Shamima Begum doesn’t seem to be doing herself any favours through the TV interviews that she's given.
[00:15:01] Especially during the early interviews, from 2019, she showed no remorse whatsoever and continued to show sympathy for ISIS's values and beliefs.
[00:15:14] She even sort of boasted that she'd seen beheaded heads in the bin, the severed heads of enemy fighters. And when the journalist asked her what that felt like, she said that it didn’t “faze her at all”, she wasn’t bothered by it.
[00:15:31] Perhaps this just shows naivety, that she grossly misunderstood what might happen, and simply assumed that she could click her fingers and come “home” to Britain, and she got a nasty shock when she discovered that it was not going to be easy at all.
[00:15:49] Now, we've been speaking only about Shamima Begum today, but clearly she is just one example. Thousands of people left their European homes to join the Islamic State, and many are now holed up in refugee camps.
[00:16:05] What should happen to them?
[00:16:08] Of course, nobody is suggesting that they receive some kind of hero’s welcome, but should they be deprived of their citizenship and left in permanent exile or should they be returned to their country of origin?
[00:16:23] And if they are returned, what happens next?
[00:16:27] How can you go from living under ISIS rule to living in a Western democracy?
[00:16:33] If the answer is “you can’t”, then what is the answer?
[00:16:39] As the story of Shamima Begum shows, there are no easy answers, and while the Islamic State itself might now be toppled, the problem of what to do with its former citizens is far from solved.
[00:16:55] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Shamima Begum.
[00:16:59] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:17:03] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:06] Are there stories of similar young girls from your country who ran away to join ISIS? What is happening to them now, and what is the policy of your government towards former ISIS fighters?
[00:17:18] Do you think it's ever right and reasonable for someone to be stripped of their citizenship?
[00:17:23] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:27] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
