Last week, a British court refused an appeal by Shamima Begum, a twenty-year-old woman from London, to regain her British citizenship. Begum was deprived of her nationality last February, after she was discovered by the Times of London in a refugee camp in northern Syria for women and children who had escaped the collapse of isis. Begum was nineteen at the time and nine months pregnant.
She had travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State, and, during her four years there, she married a Dutch jihadi and lost two children to disease. Begum identified herself to Anthony Loyd, a war reporter for the Times, after he had stopped by the al-Hawl camp on the last day of an assignment. “I am a sister from London. I’m a Bethnal Green girl,” Begum told Loyd.
She was anxious about her unborn child. “I’m scared that this baby is going to get sick in this camp,” Begum said. That’s why I really want to get back to Britain, because I know it will get taken care of, health-wise at least.” Loyd’s story ran on the front page of the newspaper. Five days later, Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary at the time, stripped Begum of her citizenship. Her baby, a boy named Jarrah, died of a respiratory infection, when he was three weeks old.
European governments have used a hodgepodge of methods to deal with citizens who went to fight for the Islamic State or live in the doomed caliphate. In 2017, during the battle for Mosul, the Wall Street Journal reported that French special forces had been sent to the city in order to enlist Iraqi soldiers to kill French nationals. Two years earlier, David Cameron,
the British Prime Minister, authorized drone strikes against two British men who were said to be plotting terrorist attacks from Syria. The approach to women who went to join isis, and children born during its tumultuous existence, has been, in general, both more lenient and more passive. In 2016, Laura Passoni, a Belgian woman who spent nine months living outside Aleppo,
was fined fifteen thousand euros and given a suspended jail sentence. Albania, among other countries, has policies of monitoring, rather than prosecuting, women who married Islamic State fighters and then returned from the conflict.
