Shamima Begum lost her bid to restore UK citizenship after joining the IS group.
Shamima Begum was stripped of her British citizenship after travelling to Syria to marry an Islamic State group fighter lost her legal battle to reverse the decision on Wednesday.
Here are five points on Shamima Begum:
- Shamima Begum was 15 when she left her east London home for Syria with two school friends in 2015. While there, she married an IS fighter and had three children, none of whom survived.
- The 23-year-old is one of hundreds of Europeans whose fate has challenged governments following the 2019 collapse of the Islamist extremists' self-styled caliphate.
- In February 2019, she said she was left stateless when Britain's then-interior minister Sajid Javid revoked her British citizenship on national security grounds after she was found in the Syrian camp. A UK tribunal ruled in 2020 that she was not stateless because she was "a citizen of Bangladesh by descent" when the decision was made, by virtue of her Bangladeshi mother.
- The UK Supreme Court last year refused Begum permission to enter the UK to fight her citizenship case. She subsequently took her case to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), which ruled on Wednesday.
- Begum's apparent lack of remorse in initial interviews drew outrage, but she has since expressed regret for her actions and sympathy for IS victims. In a documentary last year, she said that on her arrival in Syria, she quickly realised that IS was "trapping people" to boost the caliphate's numbers and "look good."
