Brits who joined ISIS are being quietly repatriated to the UK after years in the wilderness, reports claim. Naturally, parts of the right-wing press decided to flatten the whole thing into ‘ISIS BRIDES’ headlines. Because complexities – or even basic facts – do not sell copies of the Daily Mail.

Speak of the devil, here is the Mail’s offering so you don’t have to go and search:

ISIS brides escape Syrian prison camp as fears grow Shamima Begum could return to UK

The repatriation story was originally reported in the Times of London. The Murdoch-owned paper said:

Six women in camps held by the western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been sent back to Britain without fanfare, along with nine children.

Syria authorities are currently fighting the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The new Syrian government is headed by former Al-Qaeda figures bought in from the cold and endorsed by the US and UK.

The Al-Roj detention camp where the six women were held, and Begum is believed to be detained, is currently guarded by the SDF – for now.

Shamima Begum might ‘go underground’

The Daily Star reported with some flabbergast that British special forces were on standby to snatch Begum. Because this emaciated and presumably deeply traumatised 26yr old is so dangerous that she might:

escape from the prison camp, go underground, and attempt to organize terrorist attacks in the UK.

An unnamed ‘intelligence source’ told the Star:

It’s absolute chaos in Syria. There has been concern for months that if the control of the prisons was lost, thousands of ISIS terrorists would be free to cause havoc.

There is no doubt the terrorists would target the UK. There is still a view within MI5 that Begum does represent a threat because she could easily become a figurehead for Islamist terrorist groups.

But as we’ll see, Western intelligence services have encountered Shamima Begum before. In fact, they were central to her being in Syria in the first place.

Abandoning obligations

Shamima Begum is one of the far-right and the right-wing press’s favoured punching bags. Groomed online as a child, Begum went to Syria in aged 15 in 2015. She was married off to an ISIS fighter. She reportedly bore and lost three children, had her citizenship revoked, and has been detained in a prison camp for years.

There’s more than a little irony here. Because the British far-right – which is quite famously riddled with paedophiles – has made it their whole personality to defend British girls from ‘grooming’. Just not this one, it seems. And another inconvenient detail concerns the ISIS operative who smuggled Begum into Syria. It later turned out he was working for Canadian intelligence.

But Begum and others like her are not completely without advocates. In November 2025, a report by the Independent Commission on UK Counter-Terrorism Law, Policy and Practice warned that the UK’s policy:

of strategic distance toward nationals in Syrian detention camps is unsustainable and inconsistent with international human rights obligations.

And Maya Foa, director of human rights charity Reprieve, told the Times:

While all of our security allies have a policy of repatriating families, Britain has taken a ‘do nothing’ approach.

Over two governments they have brought home just a handful of women and children — and there have been even fewer under this government than the previous one.

She added:

This approach is totally inadequate in the current moment, when British families are at acute risk, in a dangerous detention camp that could collapse at any time. The US brought its people back long ago and has urged Britain to do the same. Where there are cases to answer, the adults can be prosecuted in British courts.

With Syria on the edge of war again Begum, like other Brits in Syria, are people trapped between enormous forces. Begum is unique among them though: effectively a stateless hate figure wheeled out by the establishment press once in a while to stir up the mob. The fact a close UK ally’s intelligence service helped put her in Syria as a child seems to have been tipped into the War on Terror’s virtually bottomless memory hole. The right answer is to bring her back, try her if she has committed crimes and fully investigate the circumstances of her being in Syria at all.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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