Up to 3,000 children born to foreign nationals like Shamima Begum may be at risk in Syria
In a place the British government says remains too difficult for diplomats to reach, scores of its officials have been present for at least the past two years.
MI6 officers, as well as SAS troopers and commanders have formed strong ties with local Kurdish officials in north-eastern Syria, where two refugee camps teeming with the remnants of Islamic State (Isis) are located.
Continue reading...The final unravelling of the Islamic State’s evil caliphate exerts a horrible fascination. The jihadis committed many appalling crimes in Syria and Iraq – exploiting the chaos caused by the Syrian civil war – and were responsible, directly or indirectly, for murderous attacks in Britain and several other European countries.
Most people expect a reckoning. It is only right that Isis fighters who have been captured alive, and those who gave them aid and succour, should face justice as soon as possible.
Continue reading...Sajid Javid accused of appeasing populists by ordering UK citizenship to be revoked
The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has come under fire for his decision to revoke the British citizenship of Shamima Begum, whose baby son has died in a Syrian refugee camp.
Begum, 19, left the UK in 2015 with two school friends to join Islamic State in Syria and said last month she wanted to return home. But Javid insisted he would do all in his power to prevent her coming back and ordered her citizenship to be revoked.
Continue reading...Three-week-old infant is the third child the teenager from east London has lost
The newborn son of Shamima Begum has died in a Syrian refugee camp. The baby boy, named Jarrah, was buried on Friday, three weeks after the east London teenager turned Islamic State devotee gave birth.
A Kurdish intelligence official said the infant had been taken to hospital in al-Roj camp in north-eastern Syria with breathing difficulties several times in the past week. A friend of Begum said “the baby turned blue and was cold” before being rushed to a clinic inside the camp. Jarrah is understood to have been buried along with two other children who were burned in a fire on Thursday night.
Continue reading...RAF says 4,315 Isis fighters were killed or injured in airstrikes and just one civilian
The Ministry of Defence claim that the RAF killed only one civilian in thousands of airstrikes against Isis has been dismissed as ludicrous and “stretching credibility”.
According figures released by the MoD following a freedom of information request by the charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), the RAF strikes between 2014 and January this year killed or injured 4,315 of the group’s fighters. It said 90% of those were killed.
Continue reading...Kurdish-led forces have launched a final assault on the last pocket held by Islamic State in eastern Syria
The caliphate is a hellscape of smoke and fire – Isis has nowhere left to go
Continue reading...Hawar was healthy but I felt nothing but guilt for bringing him into the world
I was nine months pregnant when Islamic State came. It was 2014 and I was living with my husband, Ferhad, and one-year-old son, Haval, in the village of Tal Qasab in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. My husband and I had been childhood sweethearts. We led a simple life, and were very happy.
For a couple of months, we had been worrying about an attack; Isis were targeting the Yazidi people in our region. Then, one August morning, we woke to the news that they had attacked Tuazar, the neighbouring village. We had just sat down to breakfast when a bullet hit our window. I looked outside and realised our neighbours were running for their lives.
Continue reading...Nineteen-year-old Briton and newborn son relocated due to ‘safety concerns’
Shamima Begum and her newborn baby have been moved from a Syrian refugee camp after threats were made against them, according to her family’s lawyer.
The 19-year-old and her son were moved from the Al-Hol camp in the north of the country due to “safety concerns around her and her baby”, Tasnime Akunjee said.
Continue reading...Reports of attacks and gunfire in some areas as voters go to polls to elect president
Nigeria’s long-awaited presidential election went ahead on Saturday, marred by heavy gunfire in the north-east, killings in the south and reports of technology failures and vote buying across the country.
Some voters arrived at polling stations at 3am to ensure their ballot was counted in an election dominated by the current president, Muhammadu Buhari, and a former vice-president Atiku Abubakar.
Continue reading...Jack Letts left the country a year before Shamima Begum and is suspected of joining Isis
A second Briton who left to go to Syria has said he wants to return to the UK. Jack Letts, who is suspected of joining Islamic State, said he missed Britain, but doubted he would ever be allowed to return.
Letts, 23, who was dubbed “Jihadi Jack” by British media and holds dual nationality through his Canadian father, told ITV News he did not believe either nation would help him because “no one really cares”.
Continue reading...Ahmed Ali Muthana files suit after officials said New Jersey-born daughter was not a US citizen and would not be allowed home
The father of an Alabama woman who joined the Islamic State group in Syria is suing to bring her home after the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of declaring that she was not a US citizen.
Hoda Muthana, 24, told the Guardian this week that she regretted leaving the US to join the terrorist group and wants to return from Syria with her 18-month-old son. She has said she is willing to face prosecution in the United States over her incendiary propaganda on behalf of the ruthless but dwindling group.
Continue reading...Nineteen-year-old who joined Isis asks UK to show ‘a bit more mercy’ in assessing her case
Shamima Begum has said she is “willing to change”, as she issued a plea to the UK government for “mercy” after the home secretary moved to strip her of her British nationality.
The British-born 19-year-old, who travelled from east London to Syria to join Islamic State in 2015, wants to return from Syria because her newborn son is unwell, and she does not wish to allow him to return to the UK alone.
Continue reading...Special forces said to be preparing to storm Baghuz to flush out last Islamic State diehards
They left Baghuz in a convoy of trucks, slowly snaking across the desert as thin trails of black smoke from mortar strikes drifted into the sky behind them.
The Islamic State fighters dangled their legs off the backs of vehicles normally used for transporting sheep. Brightly coloured keffiyehs wrapped around their faces, they stared at Kurdish troops as they passed without saying a word.
Continue reading...Family disappointed at Home Office decision and considering legal position, says lawyer
The family of a teenager who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State has been told the Home Office intends to revoke her British citizenship, according to their lawyer.
Shamima Begum, who left her home in Bethnal Green, east London, at the age of 15, is in a refugee camp in Syria, where she gave birth to a boy at the weekend.
Continue reading...Germany will put fighters on trial, while Hungary says they should not be allowed back
Donald Trump’s demand that Germany, France and Britain repatriate and prosecute their citizens fighting in Syria has met a mixed response in Europe as countries baulk at the difficulties involved in taking back hundreds of alleged jihadis.
Germany pledged on Monday to put its foreign fighters on trial, but warned their repatriation would be “extremely difficult”, while France said it would not act for now on Trump’s call but would take militants back on a “case-by-case” basis.
Continue reading...Photojournalist Achilleas Zavallis has been in Syria covering the collapse of Islamic State across the region and the resultant displacement of families
For the past week the Syrian Democratic Forces have been trying to defeat the last remnants of Islamic State that fortified themselves in the small town located on the banks of the Euphrates River, near the Iraqi border.
Continue reading...Four years ago, 24-year-old Hoda Muthana left her family in the US to travel to Syria and join Islamic State. Now, after being captured by Kurdish forces, she is pleading to return home to Alabama
* Hear the Guardian's Middle East correspondent, Martin Chulov, speak to Hoda Muthana about her life with Isis and eventual escape on tomorrow's Today in Focus
Exclusive: Hoda Muthana is only American among 1,500 foreign women and children at a Syrian refugee camp
An American woman captured by Kurdish forces after fleeing the last pocket of land controlled by Islamic State says she “deeply regrets” travelling to Syria to join the terror group and has pleaded to be allowed to return to her family in Alabama.
Related: Agonising hunt by US father for children trapped in Isis enclave
Continue reading...In late March 2015, Bashiurul Shikder made an urgent call home to ask about his wife and children. The 37-year-old American had just completed a pilgrimage to Mecca and his repeated messages to his wife in Florida had gone unanswered for over a week. Come home, his family told him. They’re in hospital. A short while later came the truth: “They finally told me, ‘they’re gone’,” said Shikder. “She’d taken them to Isis.”
In the anguished following days and the four long years since, Shikder’s search for his children, Yusuf, then seven, and Zahra, then three, has been a bitter journey, which he has kept to himself until now. As the ground held by Islamic State shrank, Shikder desperately followed his family’s retreat to the last enclave of the final town held by the group – a battered pocket of an eastern Syrian town named Baghuz.
Continue reading...The collapse of the Isis caliphate’s last stronghold in Syria is sending shockwaves across the region, changing the calculations of the major powers as they jockey for advantage. Triumphalism in Washington, Moscow and Damascus risks obscuring the human cost of a “victory” that may quickly prove transitory.
Of immediate concern is the fate of civilians, mainly women and children, displaced from formerly Isis-controlled areas where many were held against their will. The independent International Rescue Committee says up to 4,000 people are fleeing towards the al-Hawl refugee camp in north-east Syria.
Continue reading...