The meeting of a young Shamima Begum with a “Canadian spy” in Istanbul before he reportedly transported her into Syria has been captured on new footage.
At the main bus terminal in the Turkish city in 2015, footage acquired by the BBC shows Begum, then 15 years old, with two other East London schoolgirls, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and 15-year-old Amira Abase, changing between vehicles.
Mohammed Al Rasheed, who is suspected of transporting the girls from Turkey to ISIS-controlled Syria while serving as an agent for Canada, is the one who shot the video.
Even while the Metropolitan Police was launching a massive worldwide hunt for the three, Canada reportedly withheld this information from the public. It is said that once Britain was ultimately told, it was similarly convinced to remain silent.
Ms. Begum lost her British citizenship in 2019, four years after leaving the country to join ISIS.
Ms. Begum said that without Rasheed’s assistance, she would “never” have been able to join ISIS in an upcoming BBC podcast titled “I’m Not A Monster.”
From Turkey to Syria, “He (Rasheed) organised the whole journey… Without the aid of smugglers, I don’t believe anybody could have reached Syria.
He has aided several individuals in entering. We just followed his instructions since he was the expert and we had any knowledge.
According to Ms. Begum’s attorney Tasnime Akunjee, today’s new revelation considerably bolstered his client’s case and increased the likelihood that she would now be readmitted to the UK, according to MailOnline.
According to the Modern Slavery Act, this proves Shamima was a trafficked individual, he argued.
There is a lot of legal pressure to have someone deported when they are a victim of trafficking since the UK is bound by many treaties to do so.
“This was an allied state that was supposed to be working to safeguard our people but in its risk-taking algorithm decided they would endanger the lives of British youngsters.”
Sajid Javid, the former Home Secretary who decided to prevent Begum from entering the UK, claimed today that he still stood by his choice.
He said on Good Morning Britain, “I’m not getting into specifics of the case, but what I will say is that you definitely haven’t seen what I witnessed.”
And since you are smart, responsible people, you would have made the same choice if you had known what I knew.
According to the BBC and The Times, citing material from Richard Kerbaj’s The Secret History of the Five Eyes, Rasheed was commanding the Turkish part of a ring shipping individuals to IS while giving information to Canadian intelligence.
Before he allegedly assisted Ms. Begum and her two companions, he is said to have enabled the flight of British men, women, and children to IS for at least eight months.
He allegedly admitted to sharing a picture of the passport she was using when he was apprehended in Turkey a few days after transporting the jihadi bride to ISIS.
According to The Secret History of the Five Eyes, Canada ultimately acknowledged its participation in the conspiracy because its leaders were afraid of being found out. They then persuaded Britain to conceal its part in the plot.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), according to the book, chose to keep quiet about the bombshell charges by relying only on secrecy, which shields all intelligence agencies, even those inside the Five Eyes, from possible humiliation.
Describe Five Eyes.
The UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are members of the Five Eyes partnership, which shares information.
Five Eyes (FVEY) began as a result of intelligence exchange between British and American codebreakers during the Second World War.
Winston Churchill stressed the need of “the brotherly union of the English-speaking peoples” after the war to stop the Soviet Union from expanding its sphere of influence.
As the Cold War went on, ECHELON, a network for collecting and analysing signals information, became the official vehicle for the allies’ intelligence exchange.
The network was created to keep an eye on the Soviet Union and its allies, but it now keeps an eye on communications throughout the globe.
The existence of ECHELON was made known in the late 1990s, exposing one of history’s largest spy networks.
Its surveillance of internet communications during the “war on terror” came under fire because of suspicions that the member nations were breaking the law.
In order to “promote their common principles of democracy, freedom, and respect for human rights,” its mandate was recently broadened last year when it started making comments on behalf of its members.
While their British allies struggled to control the flow of would-be jihadists fleeing the UK to join Isis, the idea of saying nothing and hoping for the scandal to go away worked in Canada’s favour in terms of keeping the lid on how an agent for CSIS had smuggled western children and young adult volunteers into Syria.
“CSIS mainly succeeded in concealing the role it had played in the hiring and management of Rashed, and the agency’s deputy director was sent to Ankara to beg pardon for failing to alert the Turkish government that they had been conducting a counterintelligence operation there.”
The UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand formed the Five Eyes partnership to share information during the Cold War.
“It is our established policy that we do not comment on operational intelligence or security concerns,” a UK government spokeswoman said.
Ms. Begum was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp nine months pregnant in February 2019. Shortly after, her British citizenship was withdrawn for national security reasons.
She made the choice to appeal the Home Office’s decision to revoke her British citizenship, and she wished to be permitted to go back to the UK to continue her case.
The Court of Appeal concluded in July 2020 that “she must be allowed to enter the United Kingdom in order to continue her appeal” in order for her to have a “fair and effective appeal.”
Four months after the judgement was made, the Home Office appealed it to the Supreme Court. In February 2021, the Supreme Court decided that Ms. Begum should not be given permission to enter the UK in order to continue her appeal.
Ms. Begum expressed in an interview last summer her desire to be extradited to the UK to stand trial and her direct plea to the Prime Minister that she may be “an asset” in the battle against terrorism.
She continued by saying that as a “stupid” and naive young girl, she had been “trained” to escape to Syria.
Ten days after landing in IS territory, according to Begum, she married Dutch convert Yago Riedijk.
Her children, a one-year-old girl and a three-month-old boy, had both passed away when she and her husband fled Raqqa in January 2017, she had previously revealed to The Times.
A few time after his birth in March 2019, her third kid passed away at the al-Roj camp.