UK: The Newswashing of ISIS Bride Shamima Begum
While around 3,000 Yazidi children and women are still being held captive at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization, many in the Western media are portraying a former “ISIS bride” not only as a victim but as a celebrity.
The ISIS bride in question Shamima Begum, a British citizen who left the UK to join ISIS in Syria in 2015, and was later stripped of her British citizenship. Begum was chosen by The Times Magazine in the UK to lionize on February 4, both on its cover and in an eight-page feature. She is now part of a glamorized “newswashing” campaign to help get her British citizenship back.
The UK’s Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal is scheduled to rule this week on Begum’s appeal against being stripped of her citizenship.
ISIS brides were complicit in ISIS’s genocide and crimes against humanity. Never mind that hostages were hung upside down and then burned alive, or locked in cages then lowered into water to drown, or crucified for hours “like Jesus;” or that children were crucified or sold as sex slaves; or that countless others were tortured, raped or lined up to have their throats slit. Never mind the beheadings of journalists such as James Foley or Steven Sotloff, or the Syrian scholar Khaled al-Asaad, 82, who was tortured for a month, then beheaded because he refused to turn over Palmyra’s priceless antiquities to ISIS. The list goes on…
The Free Yezidi Foundation recently wrote of ISIS and Begum:
“Not only terror death cult, but mass-rape genocidal organization. The decision to join was hers. Her actions contributed to unspeakable acts of brutality, which she would have continued had ISIS, Daesh not been militarily defeated.”
At its height, ISIS held about a third of Syria’s territory and 40% of Iraq’s. On June 29, 2014, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq. Wherever ISIS invaded, they brought unspeakable death and destruction, especially to non-Muslim communities, including Yazidis and Christians.
ISIS murdered thousands, and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands. ISIS also systematically committed crimes such as forced conversions, hostage taking, rapes of children and women, sexual slavery, theft, destruction, smuggling, disappearances and recruitment of boys as child soldiers. Their methods of violence not only included beheadings and crucifixions, but also mutilations, dismemberment, stoning and forcing hostages to kneel on explosives. Countless people became refugees and remain displaced due to the ISIS genocide.
By December 2017, ISIS had lost 95% of its territory, including its two biggest centers: Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and the Syrian city of Raqqa, its nominal capital.
Since March 2019, when ISIS was ousted from the last of the territory it had seized and since the fall of their caliphate, many ISIS terrorists (some of whom are citizens of Western nations) have been trying to return to their home countries.
