ISIS bride Shamima Begum will never be allowed to return to UK from Syria, says home secretary
Former ISIS teen bride Shamima Begum's pleas to return to the United Kingdom has once again hit a dead end, denied this time by Home Secretary Priti Patel who reportedly said: "No way, no way", when told of Begum's requests.
Earlier this month, the Daily Mail had tracked Begum down and found her sans veil and sporting a diamante nose stud. Begum had claimed her "mental situation is not the best" and said she needed therapy to deal with her grief.
We had reported that she had begged to be let back into the UK to face trial. She had said "I would like to be at home" and added that she already felt "punished enough already".
In 2015, the then 15-year-old Shamima Begum had fled with two other girls from Bethnal Green, London, to join the terrorist organization in Syria. She claimed she served in the ISIS' "morality police", stitched suicide bombers' vents and tried to recruit other women to join the group before its collapse.
Once claiming that she had no regrets over joining the terrorist organization, Begum said to the Mail that she "hates the Dawla (the name for IS)" and "hate these women and what they stand for and what they believe in and that they think they can terrorize anyone who does not share their views."
She said her "mental health situation is not the best" and claimed she needed therapy to deal with her grief. She said no one in the camp could begin to understand what she had experienced.
Begum lost her third son within weeks after being born in February this year. Begum was married to Dutch ISIS recruit Yago Riedijk. He is currently facing six years in prison if he returns home and is temporarily being held in a Kurdish detention center in north-eastern Syria.
To The Sun, Priti Patel said that it was "quite reassuring" to see that Begum was still in war-torn Syria. She said, "Our job is to keep our country safe. We don’t need people who have done harm and left our country to be part of a death cult and to perpetuate that ideology."
"We cannot have people who would do us harm allowed to enter our country – and that includes this woman," she said.
Begum's UK citizenship was revoked by Patel's predecessor, Sajid Javid, earlier this year. Patel said to The Sun, "Everything I see in terms of security and intelligence, I am simply not willing to allow anybody who has been active supporters or campaigners for IS in this country."