Up to 100 ‘British’ Children Born to Islamic State Brides in Syria

Displaced Syrian women hold a child as they wait at a makeshift clinic at the Internally D
FADEL SENNA/AFP/Getty
Victoria Friedman

There are as many as 100 children born to Islamic State brides in Syria who can claim British citizenship, according to sources speaking to The Telegraph.

The newspaper also reports that 150 women and girls left the UK to left to join the terrorist death cult in Syria, with almost all marrying jihadist fighters and giving birth.

The report comes as the British government last week stripped female Islamic State member Shamima Begum of her British citizenship — but indicated that the citizenship status of her son, born in a Syrian refugee camp to the Bangladeshi national and fathered by Dutch Muslim convert and convicted terrorist Yago Riedijk, would be unaffected.

The case raises the question of how British authorities will respond to the issue of the citizenship and residency rights of the other 100 children born overseas to British Islamic State members.

The Daily Mail met with Begum at the Al-Hawl refugee camp in Syria in an interview published Monday in which the 19-year-old attempted to appear contrite, and depicted the ‘Daeshi’ section of the camp where “hundreds of fanatical IS families” reside, separated from the rest of the some-40,000 displaced persons by armed guards and barbed-wire fencing.

The newspaper claims that besides Begum are “as many as a dozen Britons, but most are going to painstaking lengths not to be identified.”

However, other displaced Syrian women told The Telegraph that despite the Caliphate crumbling, they remain supporters of Islamic State with one woman, Umm Hamza, who had just left one of the last jihadi strongholds of Baghuz, telling the newspaper, “We are weak now but we will come back again.”

Like Shamima Begum, who said that she did not regret joining the terror group, the ISIS wives leaving Baghuz were described by the newspaper as having “still burned with the fanaticism that powered the Islamic State for the last five years. They offered no remorse for the caliphate’s crimes and vowed that it would it one day return.”

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were said to have been shocked by the number of civilians still in Baghuz, expecting there to be only 1,500 but finding as many as 5,000 have surrendered to the Western-backed Kurdish/Arab alliance, with The Telegraph saying that most of the women continue to express support for the terror group.

One woman identified by her Islamic nickname ‘Umm Mohammed’ — ‘mother of Mohammed’ — said that any women claiming they were not supporters of the Islamist extremist group were not telling the truth.

“Everyone here is from the Islamic State. Every one of us,” she said. “Anyone who says they are not is a liar,” she added.

Since the story of Shamima Begum broke, a 2018 petition to the government to ban “all ISIS members from returning to UK” has surged from tens of thousands of signatures to more than half a million.

In January 2018, the government admitted that it did not know where hundreds of returned suspected Islamic State fighters were,. In the following month, it confirmed that “a significant portion” of the more than 400 fighters who were known to have returned to the UK were at large, had not been charged with any terror offences, and were not under active surveillance after having been assessed as “no longer of national security concern.”

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.