British Home Secretary Priti Patel has reiterated her predecessor Sajid Javid’s stance and ruled out the prospect of Islamic State (ISIS)  recruit Shamima Begum returning to the UK under her watch at the UK Home Office.
Begum, who was 15 years old when she secretly fled her home in east London in 2015 to join the terrorist group, is now living in a camp run by Kurdish forces in Northern Syria. She has repeatedly begged British authorities to permit her to return and has recently even said she is willing to face all court proceedings and even imprisonment in a UK jail.
“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 perpetrate that ideology,” Patel said in a statement on Sunday.
“We cannot have people who would do us harm allowed to enter our country – and that includes this woman,” she said, in reference to Begum.
Under British law a person can have their citizenship revoked but they cannot be made stateless. Earlier this year, Javid as UK home secretary at the time, had withdrawn Begum’s British citizenship due to her Bangladeshi roots through her parents, something Patel has now upheld this week despite the Bangladesh government having repeatedly denied any possibility of allowing her entry into Bangladesh.
“My mental health situation is not the best,” Begum recently said from her detention camp.
She also claims to have turned her back on ISIS, saying that she hates the terror group for what they stand for and what they believe in.
Her plea for return to Britain, the country of her birth and childhood and where her family is based, came as another so-called ISIS jihadi bride issued a public apology in order to be able to return to the UK.
Tooba Gondal, with roots in Pakistan, also grew up in a similar east London setting as Begum.
“I want to face justice in a British court. I wish to redeem myself. I would like Britain to accept my apology and give me another chance,” the 25-year-old said in an open letter.
She was banned from re-entering the UK in November 2018 by a Home Office exclusion order, but her son is entitled to UK citizenship because his father – who blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Iraq – was British.
However, Priti Patel’s latest intervention on the issue makes the prospect of either of them being considered for a review of their citizenship plea unlikely.