A woman who left the United Kingdom to join ISIS at the age of 15 has lost her Court of Appeal challenge over the decision to remove her British citizenship.
Shamima Begum flew to Syria in 2015 with two school friends to join the terror group. While there, she married an ISIS fighter and spent several years living in Raqqa.
Begum then reappeared in al-Hawl, a Syrian refugee camp, in 2019. She made international headlines as an “ISIS bride” after pleading with the UK government to be allowed to return to her home country for the birth of her son.
Then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid removed her British citizenship in February that year, and Begum’s newborn son died in a Syrian refugee camp the following month. She told UK media she had two other children prior to that baby, who also died in Syria during infancy.
Damn, that fucking sucks… but, like, refugees who didn’t voluntarily join an extremist group are definitely more worthy of asylum or other aide.
She was 15 when she was trafficked to Syria by a people smuggler who turned out to be a Canadian asset.
We have age of consent laws for a good reason.
15 year olds have underdeveloped brains and sometimes make shit decisions, that’s why we don’t legally enable them to make decisions about stuff like this. This kid got groomed.
I mean, that’s a fair argument… but she went off to join bloody isis. You don’t have to be too old to know what the hell isis is do and have done. I agree one mistake at 15 having such huge consequences is pretty bad… but it’s not like she stole her parents car and went on a joyride, she joined bloody terrorists. That’s gonna stick no matter how old you get because it’s insane. I do agree rendering her stateless is our fault and she should probably stay a citizen for that reason alone but she doesn’t deserve to move beyond the stigma of what she did even if she was very young when she did.
@emax_gomax yeah what she did was really bad, and I think she needs jail and probably the really intense rehab they do for child soldiers.
But it should be in the UK.
Many many of the kids in DRC and Sierra Leone who get groomed or kidnapped into child soldier armies have committed war crimes. The social stigma they carry afterwards is a big problem and if they don’t get proper rehab they just end up in more violence.
So I agree there are no easy answers. But the nation which produced the criminal should be the one who deals with it not dump it onto others.
As I said, it fucking sucks - but I’d rather see Syrians who were caught in the middle of a war through no action of their own prioritized. I don’t know this woman and hope she can raise her family in peace - but I’d rather focus on locals first.
@xmunk it’s not really a choice between those two things tho.
Bit of a cop out, the reality is that Syrians have to pay to clothe, feed, and securely house someone who was groomed and radicalized in Britain.
Exporting your criminals because you’d rather import worthier citizens isn’t a moral thing to do in my opinion.
It’s basically taking advantage of the fact that Syrians are in no shape to expel the radicalized Westerners who came over there to kill them.
At least in my opinion, Hamas is the good guys. They are also labeled as an extremist group. So are we actually wrong to say ISIS is universally bad? I mean, both groups took power is response to foreign invaders just full on wrecking their shit constantly. Both groups employed Gorilla warfare to most effectively damage a far superior military. I’ve been recognizing more and more lately that America is almost always the bad guys in wars. So does that imply that ISIS was actually the good guys?
Edit: Nope, we are not wrong for saying ISIS is bad. Thanks for the confirmation.
You are kinda glossing over an awful lot of wholesale slaughter carried out on civilians. It doesn’t count as “guriella war” war when the people you are shooting are civilians, not soldiers.
The state of Israel and the IDF are undertaking a colonial, genocidal war in Palestine. That doesn’t make Hamas the good guys.
Yeah……you need to go outside and touch some grass. Literally everything you just said is wrong.
Damn, I really should have explicitly formulated that comment as a question asking whether my current beliefs are wrong, rather than stating incorrect opinions as a fact. Wait, hold on a second… I did do that!
lol okay bro
How do I delete someone else’s comment?
ctrl+alt+del
does that imply that ISIS was actually the good guys?
For me, it comes down to how much damage the group does to the people under it’s control. ISIS and the Taliban seem to be rather brutal and repressive to the civilians, especially women: women must wear Islamic clothes, can’t go to school for long, can’t go out alone, etc etc. Admittedly I’m less familiar with Hamas, but I just haven’t seen stories of that kind of brutality from them.
At the cost of likely downvotes
women must wear Islamic clothes, can’t go to school for long, can’t go out alone, etc etc
As an outsider, this is literally what I expect America to be like in 10 years
As long as you aren’t queer, a woman, or Jewish, you’ll be fine, probably. If you are gay and they find you, you are fucked beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is what they did to a hamas commander who they suspected of being gay. Wasn’t even proven.
They said Ishtiwi told them during a family visit to the jail that he had been whipped, deprived of sleep and hung from the ceiling during his detention.
[Then shot him in the chest three times the next day, killing him]
https://www.newsweek.com/prominent-hamas-commander-was-executed-after-accusations-gay-sex-432343
My dude, ISIS was literally burning people alive in cages. That’s not even the worst thing they’ve regularly done. They are literally evil incarnate.
Hamas is not as bad but that’s really not saying much. They still actively want to commit genocide. ANYONE who openly calls for genocide is a piece of shit in my book.
You see, I agreed with your first section. But given your 2nd section, now I question the 1st as well. Hamas does not want to genocide anybody except the people genociding them. Which is an extremely obvious reaction to genocide. Jews wanted to kill all Nazis, were the jews calling for genocide? Would you have both sides the victims of the Holocaust like you are the victims of the current genocide?
I’m pretty sure your 1st section is still correct, but when you’re right about stuff, don’t follow it up with bullshit, it just brings the rest into question.
ISIS and Hamas are entirely different.
If anything ISIS seems like an israeli proxy created to destabilize other countries in the region and attack their government. ISIS never attacks israel. And recently they attacked Iran instead of israel which is very questionable.
And ISIS treats their soldiers in israel… and receives money from israel…-.
Hamas is not interested in attacking other countries or expanding their Lebensraum. Hamas is very comparable with the ANC in South Africa, or the IRA in the UK. Their people were oppressed and they started asking for their rights a little less nicely.
No
Damn. You fuck up as a teenager from time to time. It’s just how it is. But this makes…most of my fuckups as a teen look completely harmless.
15 year old teen that got trafficked got judged as if she was a fully mature adult lmao.
Relevant Onion video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84phU8of02U
This also set a bad precedent for anyone with dual citizenship. Yes her situation was a bit…unique. but if they decided next week that being lgbtq is illegal they can start stripping citizenship from dualies and kicking them out.
I don’t know about that. That seems like a extreme slippery slope.
There is a difference where you are joining enemy combatants, ones with active military operations who are shooting at citizens of the home country.
So the only way the metaphor would be comparable is if the gay armada decides to rise up against a country.
All I have to add is that when I was fifteen I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.
I was 15 yo too but I absolutely didn’t have the means or resources to flee a country and join another country.
That’s a LOT of micro decisions there, followed by choosing to stay for years.
I absolutely didn’t have the means or resources to flee a country and join another country.
Neither did she.
I did not know that. Thank you.
Why don’t you link the other articles of what she did in Syria herself?
Because they’re not relevant to the point I was addressing. How is that not obvious?
I have elsewhere said that she should face justice here. There has been no trial, no accounting for what she did and why, and no opportunity for the Yazedi she was complicit in enslaving to have their say about it.
The LGBTQ bit wasn’t maybe the best metaphor. But the point stands. They’ve done this, and now they can easily do it again, and with less cause.
The law in this wording was here in 1980. Previous laws that allow stripping of citizenship based on security threats have been around for 100 years. Yearly 20 people get this treatment. Yet it hasn’t been a problem, since they don’t have a PR company.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=84phU8of02U
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Is Begum stateless? I thought that the UN “Conventional relating to the status of stateless persons” forbids the removal of citizenship that renders a person stateless. She may have to return to the UK to face criminal charges due to her cooperation with a terrorist group, but I do not think the UK is allowed by the Convention to revoke her citizenship.
She had the opportunity to gain Bangladeshi citizenship until she turned 21, the UK cancelled her citizenship when she was 19 so she was supposedly not stateless at the time they cancelled it. She couldn’t get to Bangladesh in order to apply for citizenship but that is apparently not enough to reinstate her UK citizenship according to this ruling.
@profdc9 yeah, she’s definitely stateless.
Since making people stateless is a violation of international law, the UK used the claim that she could become a citizen of Bangladesh (she’s never been there but it’s her heritage).
The Bangladesh repudiated it, and since only Bangladesh can grant anyone Bangladeshi citizenship, she has no citizenship.
Yeah the fact that the state can just remove citizenship is very questionable but literally no sane person should have anything to do with ISIS.
