In 2015, 15-year-old Shamima Begum, left Bethnal Green, east London, along with Amira Abase (15) and Kadiza Sultana (16), to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In a new book, early allegations that the girls were aided on their journey by Canadian intelligence agents have been corroborated.
Richard Kerbaj, former security correspondent for The Sunday Times, in his new book The secret history of the Five Eyes has named this agent as Mohammed Al Rasheed, who played a role as a trafficker of would-be ISIL recruits from Turkey into Syria, all the while passing information onto his Canadian handlers. The ‘Five Eyes’ is an intelligence sharing alliance between Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Kerbaj also claimed that Canadian intelligence services quickly appealed to their British counterparts to cover up their involvement in the girls’ trafficking.
Begum herself has gone on record as saying that their journey into Syria would have been impossible without Al Rasheed; he was the one who supplied them with the information and means to complete their journey. That Britain, which engages in racist mass surveillance and harassment under the guise of the anti-terrorist Prevent programme, is involved in intelligence operations with another racist, imperialist state which is complicit in the radicalisation and trafficking of young people shows the rank hypocrisy of imperialism as an international system.
Sultana was killed in a rocket strike in Raqqa, Syria in 2016 and Abase is believed to have been killed in fighting in late 2018/early 2019, leaving Begum, now 23, as the last survivor of the three. In the years since her resurfacing in a refugee camp in northern Syria in 2019, then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid has stripped Begum of her British citizenship, rendering her stateless. In 2021 the Supreme Court denied Begum the right to enter Britain in order to challenge her statelessness. All this despite not having been convicted of or charged with any crimes in Britain, Syria or anywhere else. New Prime Minister Liz Truss and her ultra-reactionary Cabinet are unlikely to look on her case with friendly eyes.
The Labour Party has been silent on Begum since 2019. To oppose the racism to which Begum has been subject would require opposing the extension of racist immigration laws which have continued under all British governments, Labour and Tory. Our position is clear, all immigration controls in imperialist states like Britain are necessarily racist; they must all therefore be opposed.
Despine Dohman
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 290 October/November 2022
