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In a fresh attempt to undermine the soaring popularity of Reform UK Party leader Nigel Farage, one of the nation’s leading corporate broadcasters, ITV News, has claimed in a headline that the Brexit leader “says government should consider allowing Shamima Begum back home.”

Begum, 25, is a hugely controversial figure in the United Kingdom, having left Britain to join the Islamic State at the age of just 15 in 2015. She was quickly married off and had three children, all of whom died. Begum began to change her tune in 2019, claiming she believed in “some British values” and claiming the Islamic State was too oppressive.

“I fled the caliphate. Now all I want to do is come home to Britain,” she told reporters. Begum was stripped of her British citizenship in the same year. She continues to challenge the decision and is currently living in a detention camp in Syria.

FARAGE.

Farage, who has been staunchly against returning Begum to the UK, was asked about the issue at Reform UK’s South East of England conference.

“I’ve never wanted to. I’ve instinctively never wanted to,” Farage said when asked about those who defected to ISIS returning to the UK.

“I’m now thoughtful, I’m thoughtful,” he added, claiming the 25-year-old shouldn’t be classified as “an all-out ISIS killer,” like many others who went to Syria and elsewhere to cause harm and destruction in the name of political Islam.

“So she’s sort of less… She is a lesser part of the equation,” he added.

GORKA.

The conversation appears to have been sparked by the comments of the incoming Trump administration’s counter-terrorism chief, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, who told The Times newspaper, “Any nation which wishes to be seen as a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment… That is doubly so for the UK, which has a very special place in President Trump’s heart, and we would all wish to see the ‘special relationship’ fully re-established.”

Gorka’s perspective is that returning ISIS members to their countries of recent origin allows authorities to monitor them more effectively, a statement endorsed by Jonathan Hall KC, Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation.

Hall said on the matter: “Officials may not welcome this, but the numbers are not so great that — at least in the case of women, and children, for whom special considerations ought to apply on humanitarian grounds — the UK’s well-regarded counter-terrorism system could not absorb the risk. The burden of monitoring could be tempered, in high-risk cases, by phased return. At the very least, there should be a presumption of return.”

FARAGE AGAIN.

“It’s very difficult for us to think we should take back people, Shamima Begum and others, and instinctively, instinctively, it’s not something I want to do,” Farage responded, in direct contravention to what ITV claims he said in their misleading headline.

“Gorka argues that if we and other European countries don’t take back these people and put them in prison here, they will get out of prison under the new Syrian regime, leading to a problem that, in the end, we may all have to fight,” the Reform leader explained.

“I think what Gorka has done is started a debate, not one that I wanted to have and not one the British government wanted to have. But now we’re going to have to,” he remarked, as U.S. pressure ramps up towards a second deconstruction of Islamic State operations and assets under an incoming Trump administration.


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In a fresh attempt to undermine the soaring popularity of Reform UK Party leader Nigel Farage, one of the nation’s leading corporate broadcasters, ITV News, has claimed in a headline that the Brexit leader “says government should consider allowing Shamima Begum back home.”

show more