A woman who traveled to Syria as a teenager to join the Islamic State group lost her appeal today against the British government’s decision to revoke her UK citizenship, with judges saying that it wasn’t for them to rule on whether it was “harsh” to do so.

Shamima Begum, who is now 24, was 15 when she and two other girls fled from London in February 2015 to marry ISIS fighters in Syria at a time when the group’s online recruitment program lured many impressionable young people to its self-proclaimed caliphate. Begum married a Dutch man fighting for ISIS and had three children, who all died.

Authorities withdrew her British citizenship soon after she surfaced in a Syrian refugee camp in 2019, where she has been ever since. Last year, Begum lost her appeal against the decision at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a tribunal that hears challenges to decisions to remove British citizenship on national security grounds.

Her lawyers brought a further bid to overturn that decision at the Court of Appeal, with Britain’s Home Office opposing the challenge.

All three judges dismiss her case and argue she made a “calculated” decision to join ISIS even though she may have been “influenced and manipulated by others.”

In relaying the ruling, Chief Justice Sue Carr says it isn’t the court’s job to decide whether the decision to strip Begum of her British citizenship was “harsh” or whether she was the “author of her own misfortune.”

TOI/ Photo (Laura Lean)