Shamima Begum and her two friends were smuggled into Syria by a Canadian double agent, reports claim. Ms Begum ran away from her home in east London aged 15 with Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase to become a member of militant group Islamic State in 2015.
Four years later, she expressed her desire to return to the UK, but her British citizenship revoked by then Home Secretary Sajid Javid. He said the decision was made to "protect the British people".
However, Ms Begum denies any involvement in terrorist activities and is still fighting to return home. Her friend Ms Sultana was reportedly killed in a Russian air raid and Ms Abase is missing, Stoke-on-Trent Live reports.
According to the BBC and The Times, Mohammed Al Rasheed, who was allegedly working as an intelligence agent for Canada, met the three girls in Turkey before travelling with them to Syria in February 2015.
Both news outlets allege Rasheed was suppling information to Canadian intelligence while smuggling people to IS, with The Times taking quotes from the upcoming book The Secret History Of The Five Eyes. A spokesman for the UK Government stated: “It is our longstanding policy that we do not comment on operational intelligence or security matters.”
In a forthcoming podcast for the BBC, called I’m Not A Monster, Ms Begum is quoted as saying: “He (Rasheed) organised the entire trip from Turkey to Syria… I don’t think anyone would have been able to make it to Syria without the help of smugglers.
“He had helped a lot of people come in… We were just doing everything he was telling us to do because he knew everything, we didn’t know anything.”
In February 2019, Ms Begum was found, nine months pregnant, in a Syrian refugee camp. Her British citizenship was revoked on national security grounds shortly afterwards. She decided to challenge the Home Office’s decision to remove her British citizenship and wanted to be allowed to return to the UK to pursue her appeal.
In July 2020, the Court of Appeal ruled that “the only way in which she can have a fair and effective appeal is to be permitted to come into the United Kingdom to pursue her appeal”. The Home Office challenged the decision at the Supreme Court four months later.
The Supreme Court ruled in February 2021 that Ms Begum should not be granted leave to enter the UK to pursue her appeal. Last summer, during an interview, Ms Begum said she wanted to be brought back to the UK to face charges and added in a direct appeal to the Prime Minister that she could be “an asset” in the fight against terror.
She added that she had been “groomed” to flee to Syria as a “dumb” and impressionable child. Begum said she married Dutch convert Yago Riedijk 10 days after arriving in IS territory. She previously told The Times that she left Raqqa in January 2017 with her husband but her children, a one-year-old girl and a three-month-old boy, had both died.
Her third child died in the al-Roj camp in March 2019, shortly after he was born.
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