Front Burner - U.K. teens joined ISIS, Canada accused of coverup

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

It's been seven years since British teen Shamima Begum, then 15 years old, entered Syria with two school friends to join ISIS. One of Begum's friends has since gone missing, and the other was reportedly killed in an airstrike on Raqqa. Begum herself disappeared for years before encountering a journalist in al-Hawl prison camp in 2019, begging to return to the U.K. for the safety of her child, who subsequently died. Now, the BBC says the man who smuggled the girls into Syria was actually a double agent, providing information to Canadian intelligence as he trafficked for ISIS. A new book by U.K.-based writer Richard Kerbaj also accuses Canada of asking British officials to help cover up the connection. BBC journalist Joshua Baker has been interviewing Begum for the upcoming podcast, I'm Not A Monster: The Shamima Begum Story. Today, what he's learned about Begum's journey and Canada's involvement from a dossier on her alleged smuggler.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Jamie Poisson. This is sound from a video that shows three girls from England getting out of a cab near the Syrian border in 2015. The girls are just 15 and 16, but they're about to cross out of Turkey to join ISIS. Everybody take this. Now years later, one of those girls is missing.

Another has reportedly died in an airstrike in Raqqa. While the third, Shamima Begum, is stuck in a prison camp in northeast Syria pleading to come home to the UK. Begum has been the subject of a long debate. Is she a terrorist or the victim of grooming and human smuggling? But now there's accusations Canada is actually involved in a cover-up over her trafficking. Because according to the BBC, the smuggler who recorded the video that you just heard was actually a double agent spy who provided info to Canadian intelligence. Josh Baker is a BBC journalist and the host of the upcoming podcast, I'm Not a Monster, The Shamima Begum Story,

which is due to be released later this month. He's going to take us through what's happened to Begum since entering Syria and what he's learned about Canada's connection to her journey there. Hey, Josh, it's great to have you. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being here with us. So Shamima Begum's story is relatively well known in the UK, but I think many of our listeners may not be so familiar with it. So let's start in 2015 when Shamima was 15 and she and two of her friends went missing. So, as you say, back in February of 2015,

Shamima Begum, two schoolmates, disappear from East London where they live. International hunt for three young girls believed to be on their way to join ISIS. At Gatwick, they boarded a Turkish Airlines plane for Istanbul. Shamima Begum had been in touch on Twitter with a Scottish woman already in Syria, and a friend of the three from the same year at school travelled there in December and never returned. The assumption is

that they're trying to join her. Now they get on a plane to Turkey, and once in Turkey, they hook up with a man who is a sort of smuggler who will guide them through Turkey to the Syrian border and then into ISIS-controlled Syria. Now, once there, the girls largely disappear for four years until 2019, when Shamima Begum emerges from the ashes of the so-called ISIS caliphate. Do you think this is the end of the caliphate? Yeah, I really do. I don't have my hopes. They're just getting smaller and smaller. And there's so much oppression and corruption going on that I don't really think they deserve victory. Now at that point, the British government sort of has to decide what to do with her.

Now, at that point, the British government sort of has to decide what to do with her. They decide that she's a threat to Britain. So they take away her citizenship, meaning she can't come home. In light of the circumstances of your daughter, the notice of the Home Secretary's decision has been served on file today, 19th February. And the order removing her citizenship has subsequently been made. OK, then. What do you think? I don't know what to say. I'm not that shocked but I'm a bit shocked. And ever since then she's been stuck in a detention camp in the desert in northeast Syria.

Yeah. And I know in 2019, when she kind of emerged from the ashes, as you say, she was 19 years old. She was found by a reporter for The Times in this camp in Syria. And what did the public learn at that point about what had happened to her? So 2019 marked quite an interesting point. The journalist was Anthony Lloyd, a good friend of mine. And he sort of was in a camp called Al-Hol Camp, which is sort of this massive camp where ISIS detainees were being sort of bussed to. And by chance, he stumbled across Shamima. Now, at that point, she'd just walked out of the so-called caliphate. She was pregnant and, in essence, gave an interview to Anthony

to try and highlight the fact that she was in a desperate situation, that she needed help and she wanted her child to sort of survive. After my two kids died, I just, now I'm really upset because of this baby. I'm scared that this baby is going to get sick in this camp. That's why I really want to get back to Britain, because I know it will be taken care of. Like health drive, at least. Now, she made some fairly inflammatory statements.

Things about, you know, we had a terror attack in Britain at the Manchester Arena where she was sort of referring to it as almost something that could possibly be justified. I do feel that it's wrong that innocent people did get killed. It's one thing to kill a soldier that is fighting you. You know, it's self-defence, but to kill people like women and children, just like people, you know, like the women and children in Bagoos that are being killed right now unjustly by the bombings.

It's a two-way thing, really, because women and children are being killed back in the Islamic State right now. And it's kind of retaliation. Like, their justification was that it was retaliation, so I thought, OK okay that is a fair justification. Now at that point the British media were obviously incensed and there was a lot of rage towards Shamima. Times cartoonist Peter Brooks captures these feelings in this cartoon we see her clothes here soaked in blood she asks to lead a quiet life from now on.

Right-wing tabloid The Sun establishes their stance pretty clearly on their front page today. They write, no regrets, no remorse, no entry. She's not my responsibility. She is her own responsibility. She chose to take herself out there. She tore up her sister's passport, which she's stolen. She renounced citizenship of this country herself. And plus, what are we putting her on trial for for joining a terrorist organization that's not a criminal offense at the moment in this country so we need to change that but we haven't at the moment so

why do we need her back over here we can't in her words she's just been a housewife for four years for a housewife that walked past beheaded bins full of heads and things like that but she's just a housewife i think i don't think she's just now this stood in a you know stark contrast to how it was when shimura left back in 2015 at that point she was largely seen as a potential victim somebody who'd been lured by isis there was an awful lot of sympathy for her in the media and in the public's conscious. But then she emerged, not a lot was understood about her life in ISIS, and the decision was taken that she was too dangerous to come back. Now, in terms of her friends, we know that one, Khadiza, was killed in central Raqqa in an airstrike, and the other, Amira, who also traveled with her,

is missing but is presumed to have likely been killed as well in the fighting. What else do we know about Shamima's life under ISIS? You mentioned that she was pregnant when she was found in this camp in 2019. So Shamima arrives into the de facto capital of the ISIS caliphate, Raqqa, in Syria. And once there, she's in a woman's house, a madha, as they call it, which is for unmarried women. And kind of your only way out of a Madaffa is to get married. So she marries an ISIS fighter by the name of Yago. It actually really was like a normal life. The life that they show on the propaganda videos, you know, it's a normal life.

Every now and then there are bombs and stuff. Did you ever see executions? No, but I saw a headed heads in the bins. In the bins? Yeah. What was that like when you first saw that? These are the heads of captives? Yeah.

I didn't think they were one. She ends up having three, well, two children by him, three children in total, rather, two of them die during her life inside the caliphate, and one of them subsequently dies once she made it to the camps in Syria. Now, in terms of her involvement, of what was Shamima involved with within ISIS, this has kind of been the great debate for many years. You know, was she simply a wife and a mother or was she involved in more sinister things? Was she more complicit, perhaps, in some of ISIS's more extreme things?

And that's one of the things that we go on the journey to try and understand in the podcast series. One thing I wanted to ask you about was in 2019 when she had made those really incendiary statements. At the same time, she did seem to be critical of ISIS as well. Is that fair for me to say? Oh, yeah, undoubtedly. I think there is something that we cannot take for granted. The fact that Shamima Begum walked out of the caliphate to save her child is of real note. Because, you know, as Anthony Lloyd, the journalist who found her, put it to me,

some women would have said, well, if Allah wants my baby, so be it. The other thing that she was at that time was indeed critical of ISIS not being what it professed to be or what she thought she was going to. You're describing mixed feelings about Dalat then. Yeah. On the one hand, you said you didn't regret coming to be part of the caliphate. No, I don't regret it. But on the other hand... When I came and I saw that there was underground oppression

and all this happening, it came as a shock to me, like, this is actually happening. So it is slightly more balanced than perhaps that has been widely reported but she did indeed say some pretty incendiary things and i just i just want to be clear about one thing before we move on when when we say that she grew up in the uk like after the uk revoked her citizenship, is there anywhere else Jemima could go or is she really stateless? So this is where it becomes a sort of legal black hole, if you will. Now, she was born in a place called Bethel Green in East London. It's got a very large Bangladeshi

community. She is a second generation immigrant to the country. So she was born there. She's not lived anywhere else. Technically speaking, when the UK revoked her citizenship, she might have had the ability to apply for Bangladeshi citizenship. But the reality is they have said themselves that they would not issue it to her, and therefore she's not eligible. So it gets into a sort of legal hoo-ha of who you believe. But as it stands in reality today, there is nowhere else for her to go. She's stuck in Syria. She doesn't seem to have another country to go to. And certainly what I would say as well, the people who hold her, the sort of Kurdish forces that are in charge of the camp, have said to me multiple times, not only about Shamima, but also about other citizens,

including Canadians, that they've been left holding a ball of fire. There are thousands of Shamimas in these camps. And the longer they hold them, the more of a risk they become. You know, people escape from these camps. There are also children in these camps. And the predominant ideology there is that of ISIS. So it's a sort of real breeding ground for an extremist ideology that we will have to confront again in the future. So they have implored Western governments to take their citizens home. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization,

empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together.

To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. There's another side to the story that's developing involving accusations that there's been an international cover-up here, essentially, over Canadian intelligence's involvement with a smuggler. So tell me more about the man that you referenced earlier, who basically facilitated the trip from Turkey to Syria for Shamima and her two friends. His name is Mohammed al-Rashid. And what role did he play in this story? So, you know, what I've been doing is

I've been talking to Shamima for more than a year now, multiple trips to Syria to see her. And as part of that, we've been piecing together the seven years of her story for the podcast. And we honed in on various areas. And one of them is how did she actually make it to ISIS? You know, how did that transpire? At the end of the day, you have

three girls who are transiting international borders and ending up in a war-torn country. Frankly, how does that happen? So we started looking at this man, Mohammed Rashid. Now, Shamima Begum flew to Turkey, got to the Istanbul bus station and waited there for a number of hours. And you can see this on CCTV footage that's been released. But there's a moment where Mohammed Rashid arrives at the bus station. He's a tall guy with sort of curly hair and big round glasses. And he sets about guiding Shamima and her friends around the bus station, never leaving them in one waiting room for too long. And there are other ISIS travellers there as well. So it's a sort of rendezvous point, if you will, for people who want to go to ISIS. Now, we were able to obtain a dossier,

if you will, of hundreds of pages of information gathered by foreign intelligence on Mohammed Rashid, foreign intelligence and law enforcement. Now, when we started to go through this dossier, the first thing that we learned was that Mohammed Rashid was at the centre of a highly organised, people-moving, people-smuggling network. It wasn't just Shamima and her friends that he was transporting, there were others as well from all around the world, including children. And he'd been doing this for a while before Shamima arrived on the scene. And that network was controlled from Raqqa, Syria by some fairly prominent and notable ISIS members. But Rashid was also doing

something else, which was a little bit weird to us at first, he was making copies and secretly recording people he helped. So he was photographing, for example, Shamima's passports, the passport Shamima travelled on. He also, in one instance, photographed, I think, a guy's golf membership card to his golf club in London. And he also secretly filmed them. He secretly filmed Shamima and some others as well, which is pretty weird behaviour because you're essentially gathering information that incriminates you of your crimes if you're ever caught. But he wasn't just recording this, he was storing it on his computers and on external hard drives. Now, when Rashid was caught, he told authorities in a statement that we've seen, that the reason he was doing this is

he was providing information to the Canadian embassy in Jordan so you know you could take that one of two ways in the first instance you could think this is the desperate cry of a man who's just been arrested trying to come up with anything he can or you could look at it within the sort of the way he's operating and be like, oh, okay, is that why he's really gathering all this information? And it also looks like he went further, by the way. He was going into Syria and locating certain jihadists, marking internet cafes and other things as well. So there's this very strange behaviour. Now, over a long period, we set about investigating this, and we were able to confirm that Mohammed Rashid did indeed make multiple trips in and out of Jordan over a number of years. We were able to identify the two men that he cited

as his handlers at the Canadian embassy. Men by then, those names and descriptions did indeed work there at those times. But possibly most importantly, and there are other things as well that I won't get into, but most importantly, a senior serving intelligence officer, one of the agencies that's part of the coalition in the fight against ISIS, somebody extremely senior, has indeed confirmed to us multiple times that Mohammed Rashid was a double agent, providing information to the Canadians on a whole host of things, as well as trafficking people for ISIS. In addition to the reporting that the BBC has done, another UK journalist, Richard Kerbash, he's also reported on Rashid's intelligence work for Canada

in a new book that came out last week. His book also claims that CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, asked Britain to cover up Canada's role in the operation, which Britain reportedly didn't. I'm not asking you to comment on this reporting at all. I mean, no, I would say, honestly, I think Richard's work is really interesting, right? Because the way I see it is we're both doing two ends of the same story. So we've kind of got the network and the confirmation of this man being a spy. But then what Richard's uncovered

is that supposedly, and I don't know his sourcing, which is why I use the word supposedly, supposedly, and I don't know his sourcing, which is why I use the word supposedly, but supposedly Richard has identified that the Met police were briefed not long after Shamima left that the man who transported her to Syria was indeed a Canadian agent, Canadian asset, Canadian source, whatever you want to call it, which then does start to, if that is true, lead into this idea of, you know, did authorities know? I think one of the things that has been very interesting to us is that looking at the amount of people that Rashid was in contact with and looking at how terrible his electronic security was and a host of other things, I know my colleagues and I find it hard to imagine that he wouldn't have

popped up, at least in through digital surveillance, onto the radar of intelligence agencies around the world. Did the Brits know? I can't comment. Did the Canadians know? Well, yes, I've been told by an intelligent source he did. How has CSIS responded to all of this? Well, this is the thing. I mean, as is the way with not only the Canadian authorities, but the British, you know, there's a sort of blanket rule that they do not comment on matters relating to, you know, intelligence. So there's a sort of blanket rule that they do not comment on matters relating to, you know, intelligence. So there's a sort of, if you will, a blanket no comment.

What is interesting, though, is I think that it's been interesting to see some of your prime minister's responses in press conferences. The fight against terrorism requires our intelligence services to continue to be flexible and to be creative in their approaches. But every step of the way, they are bound by strict rules, by principles and values that Canadians hold dear, including around the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And we expect that those rules be followed. I know there are questions about certain incidents or operations of the past,

and we will ensure to follow up on those. Next question. He didn't deny it when he was asked about it. That they need to continue to be flexible and creative in their approaches. Because, of course, the Canadian intelligence services has come under fierce criticism for this by many people, including Shamima's lawyer, intelligence services has come under fierce criticism for this and by many people, including Shamima's lawyer, who essentially said that he was shocked by this and that intelligence

gathering looks to have been prioritized over the lives of children, right? It's hard to know what was known when was known, right? But what we can definitively say, what the BBC is happy to say, and by the way, it's very hard, as I'm sure you can imagine, to broadcast an assertion that somebody is a spy for a foreign government. You know, it's not something we do lightly. But what we can definitively say that somebody who was being run as an agent or as a spy was transporting men, women and children to ISIS. And at some point, his handlers at CSIS would have been aware of what he was doing and potentially who he was transporting. So then you have a wider question, which is a sort of moral one, if you will, about what is the cost of running agents and how do you

balance that cost? Somebody from that world once said to me, you know, we don't run angels. You know, we have to go where the information is in order to be able to defend the country. And often that involves us working with criminals or terrorists. That said, there's a pretty extreme cost here, isn't there? Some of these people that this man moved into Syria have died. Some of those people are children. And in addition to that, some of these people he moved in, we believe have gone on and fought for ISIS and killed. I understand there will be a legal hearing this November to challenge the removal of Shavima's citizenship. And what role do you think these new revelations might play in that hearing? Well, I think there's probably,

you know, a host of things that happen now. Well, first of all, as I understand it, if, you know, the British government were aware of this at any point, then that calls into question potentially other legal arguments that I believe her defence may or may not make. In terms of the hearing in, separate to that, in terms of the hearing in November, you know, one of the key things that I know her lawyers want to argue is that she is a victim of trafficking. Now, the reason they would do that is that they would say, look, British government, when you took away Shamima's citizenship, you failed to consider that she was indeed a victim of trafficking. And that needs to be considered before you remove her citizenship. Therefore, you need to reconsider.

Now, I don't know whether she would legally be classed as a victim of trafficking or not, but what we have shown is that this was a highly organized, very efficient, people-moving network that existed that Shamima had fallen into and was moving through. These two prevailing narratives about Shamima, you know, that she's a monstrous terrorist or essentially a hapless victim of grooming and trafficking. Again, I know this is a question that you're going to deal with in more detail in your podcast, but what do you believe the truth is? Tough question. Look, I think it's not for me to comment on what she is or isn't. But what I will say is I think the truth of these things is often somewhere in the middle. And

that what we tend to do in the media is we create very binary narratives. And actually, the reality is far more nuanced than we sometimes like to think. Josh, thank you very much for this. Not at all. Thank you for having me. All right, that is all for today. You can catch Josh's podcast about Shemima when it comes out later this month on BBC Sounds

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.