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...Ilham Ahmed says Kurds want observers on the border to ensure Turkey does not attack
The leader of the Syrian Kurds has called for a small international observer force to be stationed on the Turkey-Syria border to protect Kurds from what she says is the threat of crimes against humanity committed by Turkish forces.
Ilham Ahmed is co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council – the political arm of the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which have been responsible for liberating much of north-eastern Syria from Islamic State.
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...President says caliphate ‘ready to fall’ and US doesn’t want to watch ‘fighters permeate Europe’
Donald Trump has asked his European allies to “take back over 800” Islamic State fighters captured in Syria and put them on trial.
“The Caliphate is ready to fall,” the US president said in a tweet. “The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them ...”
Continue reading...Family calls for her return to UK and considers legal action to stop government blocking it
The UK’s most senior counter-terrorism officer has said that Shamima Begum, who left the UK to join Islamic State as a 15-year-old, had “potentially criminalised” herself as her family considers court action to stop the government blocking her return to Britain.
Government and counter-terrorism officials are still considering what to do after Begum, now 19, was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp after fleeing Isis’s last stronghold and said she wanted to return to Britain.
Continue reading...Wives of jihadist fighters wounded as they flee Baghuz, the final Isis enclave in Syria
Islamic State fighters shot and wounded fleeing family members trying to escape from its besieged enclave in Syria, according to a coalition commander, as Kurdish forces continued to tighten the noose on the remaining extremists.
The battle to recapture the group’s last speck of territory is now only days from completion, Kurdish commanders said, with perhaps several hundred hardcore members dug into the centre of Baghuz village, a hamlet on the banks of the river Euphrates.
Continue reading...The remarks made by the 19-year-old British Islamic State recruit Shamima Begum to a journalist in a refugee camp in eastern Syria are horrifying. She described being unmoved by the sight of a severed head, showed no sympathy for executed hostages, and said she had no regrets about her decision to leave the UK. We do not yet know whether she played any role during her four years with Islamic State other than that of a wife and mother. Other western recruits have acted as propagandists and recruiters. Ms Begum, who is heavily pregnant, wants to return to the UK and is entitled to do so, as security minister Ben Wallace has acknowledged. Bernard Hogan-Howe, who was Metropolitan police commissioner when the teenager and two friends left their homes in Bethnal Green, east London, in 2015, said then that the girls had “no reason to fear” returning, provided they had not committed terrorist offences. The official tone has now changed, with Mr Wallace saying on Thursday that he would not risk British lives to rescue UK citizens from Syria.
Ms Begum, who married a Dutch Islamic State fighter 10 days after arriving in Raqqa, told the Times she had lost two young children to illness, lived through six months during which her husband was imprisoned and tortured, and witnessed unimaginable brutality. Whatever her degree of culpability, she and her friends, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, were children when they left the UK and are thought to have been groomed. Ms Sultana is reported to have wanted to return, but been too afraid following the murder of another jihadi bride who tried to escape. Mr Sultana is thought to have been killed in an airstrike three years ago.
Continue reading...Facts on the ground as much as ethical and legal factors may come into play in repatriating
US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria have almost completely dismantled Islamic State’s once sprawling “caliphate”, with Isis fighters making their last stand in an area smaller the one sq km in the eastern desert near the border with Iraq.
Wives and children of Isis fighters, along with thousands of civilians unconnected to the group, have left for al-Hol refugee camp, where dozens of people, mostly children, have died in squalid and freezing conditions in recent weeks.
Continue reading...Ben Wallace says ‘actions have consequences’ as schoolgirl who joined Isis is found in Syria
The security minister, Ben Wallace, has said he would not put officials’ lives at risk to rescue UK citizens who went to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State, insisting “actions have consequences”.
“I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Continue reading...Shamima Begum, 19, in refugee camp in Syria after fleeing last territory held by Islamic State
An east London schoolgirl who left the UK in 2015 to join Islamic State has been tracked down in Syria where she said has no regrets about joining the group, but now wants to come home as she is nine months pregnant.
Shamima Begum, 19, said she fled the jihadists’ last remaining enclave in Baghuz, eastern Syria, as she was tired of life on a battlefield and feared for her unborn child after her two other children died.
Continue reading...Small enclave of extremists holds out in Syria against intensive bombardment
Clamouring up dirt berms, clutching babies and blankets, the newest refugees of the Islamic State could well be the last.
Inside the nearby enclave they fled are perhaps no more than 500 people – nearly all of them fighters who are refusing to leave a two square kilometre corner of eastern Syria that is all that remains of the group’s so-called caliphate.
Continue reading...Lack of participation at Middle East event reflects anger over US policy on Iran and Syria
Key European powers will offer only limited participation in a high-profile Trump administration summit on the Middle East starting on Wednesday, reflecting their growing anger over unilateral US policymaking on Iran and Syria.
The UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will leave the Warsaw summit early, pleading Brexit Commons business, while France is sending a civil servant and Germany its junior foreign minister.
Continue reading...Foreign fighters reportedly executed after launching attack against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Fresh details have emerged of the coup attempt against Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, with witnesses claiming foreign members of the terror group lost a two-day battle with his bodyguards before being rounded up and executed.
A witness who spoke to the Guardian after being smuggled from the last hamlet in eastern Syria held by Isis, said the clash took place in al Keshma, a village next to Baghouz in September, three months earlier than regional intelligence officials believed it had taken place.
Continue reading...Jihadist group placed bounty on head of foreign fighter after plot, say intelligence officials
The Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, survived a coup attempt last month launched by foreign fighters in his eastern Syrian hideout, intelligence officials believe, and the terrorist group has since placed a bounty on the main plotter’s head.
The incident is believed to have taken place on 10 January in a village near Hajin in the Euphrates River valley, where the jihadist group is clinging to its last sliver of land. Regional intelligence officials say a planned move against Baghdadi led to a firefight between foreign fighters and the fugitive terrorist chief’s bodyguards, who spirited him away to the nearby deserts.
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