Teenager who travelled from London to Syria to join Isis says decision is ‘kind of heart-breaking’
Shamima Begum, the teenager who travelled from east London to Syria to join Islamic State in 2015, has described Home Office plans to strip her of citizenship as “kind of heart-breaking”.
Related: Shamima Begum: will the plan to revoke her citizenship succeed?
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...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.
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