Foreign Secretary David Lammy says ISIS supporter Shamima Begum will remain in Syrian camp — despite protests from Trump pick Seb Gorka.
LONDON — Shamima Begum, who left the U.K. to join ISIS while at school, will not be allowed to leave Syria and return to Britain, the government’s top diplomat confirmed Thursday — despite urging from Donald Trump’s incoming team.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy was asked about Begum’s future after the U.S. president-elect’s pick for Senior Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka said the U.K. should repatriate British members of the Islamist terror group currently held in Syrian detention camps.
“Any nation which wishes to be seen as a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment,” Gorka told the Times newspaper, stressing that this applied “doubly so for the U.K.”
Asked about Gorka’s call, Lammy dismissed the possibility of Begum returning. “Shamima Begum will not be coming back to the U.K. It’s gone right through the courts. She’s not a U.K. national,” he told ITV. “We will act in our security interests. And many of those in those camps are dangerous, are radicals.”
The foreign secretary added that any ISIS-linked Britons that did return from Syria would “have to be, frankly, jailed as soon as they arrived.”
Begum, dubbed the “ISIS bride” by British media outlets, left her home in London aged 15 in 2015 to travel to Syria and join ISIS, marrying a fellow member shortly after her arrival.
Now aged 25, she was stripped of her citizenship on national security grounds in 2019 after she was discovered alive and expressed a desire to reenter the U.K. She lost a series of legal appeals against the decision.
In August last year, the Supreme Court, the U.K.’s highest court of appeal, refused Begum the chance to challenge the decision. Her lawyers said they would take her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
