More than any other, the name of Shamima Begum has become emblematic of the perdition of radicalized teenage girls who have gone to Syria, from where they regularly call for help. Born in Great Britain, the young girl was only 15 when, with two friends from her high school in Bethnal Green, in February 2015, she fled to join Daesh. Ten days after her arrival, she marries a Dutch fighter.
Over the years, testimonies have reported her zeal to enforce the strictest laws and recruit other wives to serve the caliphate. After the fall of Daesh, his numerous requests to return to the United Kingdom, with one of his babies, fueled long debates. She was finally stripped of her British nationality, along with her two traveling companions, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15, upon departure.
“He organized the whole trip from Turkey to Syria”
An investigative book published on Wednesday could reignite the embers: its author, Richard Kerbaj, a former Sunday Times security correspondent, claims that Mohammed al-Rashed, a spy working for Canadian intelligence, smuggled the schoolgirl Londoner in Syria in 2015. He assures that the British government then agreed with the Canadian government to hide the role of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), both from the media and from the family of the teenager, who moved heaven and earth to bring her back.
Mohammed Al Rasheed met the three girls at the main bus station in Istanbul, Turkey. For at least eight months, the man has been the bridgehead in Turkey of a large network of IS smugglers, controlled from the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State group in Raqqa. “He organized the whole trip from Turkey to Syria…I don’t think anyone could have gotten to Syria without the help of smugglers,” Shamima Begum says in a BBC podcast, due to air soon. “He had helped a lot of people get in… We did whatever he told us to do because he knew everything, we knew nothing”.
Scotland Yard informed?
Rasheed used to photograph the IDs of people he infiltrated in Syria, or covertly film them with his phone. The British broadcaster thus publishes a video in which we see the three young girls getting out of a taxi to enter a waiting car in Gaziantep, near the Turkish-Syrian border. These elements were forwarded to the Canadian Embassy in Jordan; he had been recruited by Canada as a spy in 2013, when he sought asylum at the embassy.
A senior intelligence officer from a country that is a member of the international coalition against ISIS confirmed to the BBC that Rasheed was providing information to Canadian intelligence services while smuggling people to ISIS.
The BBC was able to confirm that Rasheed traveled in and out of Jordan several times between 2013 and his arrest in Turkey in 2015, shortly after the girls passed through. According to the media, Scotland Yard, whose preventive role had already been criticized, was then informed that the teenagers had been brought to Syria by Rashed. The girls were already in Syria.
“Shocking” behavior
A British government spokesman declined to comment. “It has been our long-standing policy not to comment on operational intelligence or security matters,” he said. A CSIS spokesperson told the BBC it could not “comment publicly on, confirm or deny details of CSIS investigations, operational interests, methodologies or activities”.
The lawyer for Shamima Begum’s parents, Tasnime Akunjee, announced that he would take advantage of a hearing next November before the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to criticize these revelations. “Intelligence gathering seems to have taken priority over the lives of children,” he stormed, denouncing as “shocking” the behavior of “someone who is supposed to be an ally, protecting our people, rather than doing smuggling British children into a war zone”.