Let Shamima Begum return to UK or risk more terror recruits, says expert
Counter-radicalisation expert criticises Sajid Javid’s reaction, saying it feeds Isis narrative
Mark Townsend, Jamie Doward, Daniel Boffey and Nosheen Iqbal
Sat 16 Feb 2019 17.36 GMT
The home secretary’s response to teenage Islamic State bride Shamima Begum will guarantee new recruits to the ideology that underpins the terror group, a former senior counter-radicalisation expert for the government has warned.
As the debate over whether to allow Begum, who left the UK to join Islamic State as a 15-year-old, to return home continued on Saturday, Hanif Qadir said Sajid Javid’s reaction to the teenager’s predicament fed the narrative of Isis.
On Friday Javid said he “would not hesitate” to prevent the return of UK Isis recruits, an approach at odds with Begum’s family in Bethnal Green, east London, who want the 19-year-old to return home “as a matter of urgency”.
Qadir, a senior expert with the government’s counter-extremism Prevent programme and whose cases included raising the alarm about a group of schoolgirls who planned to join Isis in Syria, said: “Javid is fuelling the (Isis) narrative and giving wind to the sails of other extremists. If we continue with this trajectory we’ll be sowing the narrative for them to reap and use against us.”
Qadir, whose charity Active Change Foundation was supported by police and worked with high-profile extremists until 2016, said the home secretary’s emphatic response would backfire. “If the government doesn’t change their approach to this, we potentially have a second wave of Isis coming, the connecting up and reloading of Isis, fence-sitters who are more sympathetic to another kind of narrative,” he said.
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