A 15-year-old girl from the United Kingdom, named Shamima Begum, made a big decision to leave her country and join a group called ISIS in 2015. She went to Syria with two of her friends from school and ended up marrying a man who was fighting for ISIS. She lived in a city called Raqqa for a few years.
Later, in 2019, Shamima was found in a Syrian refugee camp called al-Hawl. She was in the news a lot because she asked if she could come back to the UK to have her baby. The man in charge of making sure the country is safe, named Sajid Javid, decided she shouldn’t be allowed to be a British citizen anymore in February of that year. Sadly, Shamima’s baby boy passed away in the refugee camp a month later. Before this baby, she had two other children who also passed away when they were very young.
A picture of Shamima was shown from a place called Roj Camp in Syria in 2021. When the court had to decide if it was okay to take away her British citizenship, a very important judge, Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, said it was a tough decision. She mentioned that some people might think it was too strict, while others believe Shamima made her own problems. The judge said it wasn’t her job to pick sides.
After the court’s decision, a lawyer named Alexander dos Santos mentioned that Shamima might still have a chance to fight the decision because it left her without a country to belong to. Her lawyers have been saying that taking away her citizenship wasn’t fair because it made her stateless and they also said she was taken to Syria against her will when she was just a child.
Shamima has been trying to tell her side of the story. She was in a documentary and a podcast where she said she’s not a bad person. She knows people are scared of her because of how she’s been shown in the media. She wishes people understood she was taken advantage of when she was younger.
Her lawyers are still fighting for her, saying she was taken to Syria in a way that wasn’t right and that the UK shouldn’t have left her without a country to call home.
