Shamima Begum revelations bring up serious questions about the UK’s actions

Since Wednesday’s revelations of the Canadian role in the Begum case, Justin Trudeau’s administration in Ottawa has been predictably tight-lipped. The UK Government – hiding behind the “national security” defence – won’t say how much it knew about the Canadian involvement either.

Leaving aside the fact that the spy networks involved seem to be more Austin Powers than James Bond, the Canadian and UK governments have serious questions to answer. Firstly, the Canadians have to explain what the hell they were doing allowing their Daesh double agent Mohammed Al Rasheed to smuggle British children into Daesh-held territory.

Of course, right-wing commentators will fall back on their time-worn rhetoric that Begum was a “hardened jihadist” who would have found her way into Syria by hook or by crook. This, like most of the narrative about Begum in the right-wing media and the Tory Party mainstream, is utter nonsense.

Shamima Begum left London for Syria aged 15 (Image: PA.)

As Begum, who hails from Tower Hamlets in East London, told BBC journalist Josh Baker, creator of the podcast I Am Not a Monster – which considers the Begum case in depth – from the moment she and her friends Amira Abase, also 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16, arrived in Gaziantep, southern Turkey, they were entirely in the hands of Al Rasheed. After all, as Begum told Baker: “We were just doing everything that he was telling us to do, because he knew everything [about crossing the Turkish-Syrian border] and we didn’t know anything.”

It now seems clear that Al Rasheed collected as much information as possible from the teenagers, including the details from their UK passports. (Abase is currently missing and Sultana is believed to have been killed by a Russian air strike in Syria in 2016.)

It beggars belief that this information, held by a Canadian agent, would not have been shared with Canada’s close ally the UK. Indeed, initial reports suggest the Metropolitan Police has for some time been aware of the information collected by the Canadian secret service.

This poses an important question for the UK Government. If it knew the British girls had been smuggled into the Daesh “caliphate” by a double agent working for the Canadians, why wasn’t it doing all in its power to get the three of them back? Indeed, why were government ministers fanning the flames of hatred against Begum and insisting she be rendered stateless in order to, in Javid’s words, “protect the British people”?

No amount of hand-wringing over the protocols of “national security” can absolve the administrations of three Tory prime ministers – David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson – of guilt over the issue of Begum’s citizenship. Javid’s decision to make her stateless was an act of mindless populism of which Donald Trump would have been proud.

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It is typical of the modern Tory Party that Javid – who adheres to no religious faith, but has a Muslim background – was used as a front for a policy that reeks of racism and Islamophobia.

Imagine, if you will, that a white, Christian 15-year-old girl from Edinburgh, had been influenced online to consider the Putin regime in Russia. Imagine that this girl took a flight to Poland and, with the assistance of a German-Russian double agent, was smuggled into eastern Ukraine where she was married off to, and had children by, a pro-Russian militiaman in the Donbas.

It is a far-fetched tale, perhaps, but barely more far-fetched than the story of Shamima Begum. Had such a scenario come to pass, you can be sure that neither the Tory government nor the UK’s right-wing media would be attacking the Scottish teenager as a “pro-Putin terrorist” who should be stripped of her UK citizenship.

RATHER, the young Scot would be seen as a victim, a brainwashed British youngster, trafficked into the hands of evil men for the sexual gratification of one of their number. In the case of Begum – which is almost identical to the fictitious one I have just outlined – racism, Islamophobia and Trumpian populism have driven an entirely different narrative.

The right-wing press has been keen to portray Begum as a committed Daesh “enforcer”, not least due to her initial refusal to renounce the group’s ideology after she was discovered in a refugee camp in northern Syria in 2019.

Let’s return to our white, Christian, Scottish teenage girl in the Donbas. If she existed, and continued to express support for Putin’s war in Ukraine, would she be portrayed as a perpetrator or a victim? The call would still be, I’m certain, to “bring our girl home”, where a dose of good old-fashioned British common sense would soon undo the pro-Moscow brainwashing.

Begum, by contrast, is to be left in stateless limbo for two reasons – she is brown-skinned, of south Asian descent, and she is Muslim. In any case, even if this young woman was still a hardened Daesh supporter who represented some kind of threat to innocent people, the fact remains that she was born and raised in the UK and is, therefore, the responsibility of the British state.

Indeed, so egregious is the UK Government’s “human fly-tipping” of Begum that it is too rich for the blood even of some Tory MPs. Prominent ones including Andrew Mitchell and David Davis (both former Cabinet ministers) have argued – much to the chagrin of the many Daily Mail readers among their party’s membership – that Begum’s citizenship should be restored and that she should be brought home to the UK.

Mitchell, who co-chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Trafficked Britons in Syria, has long maintained – with what is surely unarguable logic – that the UK Government embarrasses itself by insisting that Begum is too dangerous to return. “Since when was a schoolgirl too much for the British justice system?,” he asks.

Speaking to the BBC on Wednesday, Mitchell made the case for Begum’s return in the most powerful terms. “Shamima I would regard as having been trafficked for sex”, he told the PM programme on Radio Four. “She was trafficked to be a bride. She was under the age of 16.”

Indeed, Mitchell argued, the latest revelations about Begum being trafficked into Daesh-held territory with the assistance of a secret agent of the Canadian state renders her case “even more distressing”. For him – as a former secretary of state for international development and a former Tory chief whip – the Canadian involvement strengthens the case for the restoration of Begum’s UK citizenship and her return to the UK.

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For his part, Davis exposed the ludicrousness of the contention of senior Tories – such as Cameron, May, Johnson, Javid and, of course, the vicious current Home Secretary Priti Patel – that Begum is “too dangerous” to be restored to UK citizenship. “Regardless of what individuals like Shamima Begum have done,” Davis tweeted in February of last year, “the UK cannot simply wash our hands of Brits in the Syrian camps. The correct approach would be to return them to the UK to answer for their crimes.”

The latest revelations suggest Begum was more sinned against than sinner. The loss of all three of the children she gave birth to in Syria, and her current existence in a refugee camp in that war-devastated country, should make her a humanitarian priority.

If senior Tories and right-wing commentators want to argue that she is a criminal, let’s hear the charges in an English court of law. I suspect any court hearings would prove that Begum was, first-and-foremost, a victim of crime.

What is most shocking of all, of course, is that some of those crimes appear to have been perpetrated by the Canadian state, with the knowledge of the British state. It is time for Begum to be brought home and the Canadian and British files on her to be opened.