Britain Left Its ISIS Detainees including Shamima Begum in Kurdish Camps. Now Those Camps Are Collapsing

The detention of Shamima Begum and thousands of other Islamic State affiliates was never a legal settlement, only a political postponement. As Kurdish control in north east Syria unravels, Britain may soon confront the consequences of outsourcing justice.

When the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate collapsed in 2018 and 2019, tens of thousands of women and children linked to the group were captured by the Kurdish led Syrian Democratic Forces. These forces, backed militarily by the United States and its allies including Britain, found themselves in possession of some detainees who were not Syrian nationals whom they neither sought, nor had the legal authority to deal with.

The Kurds lacked international recognition, criminal jurisdiction over British and other foreign nationals, and any practical means to prosecute non Syrians. From the outset, they urged Western governments to repatriate their citizens for prosecution, rehabilitation, or other lawful resolution.

Most refused.

The result was the creation of camps such as al Hol and al Roj: large scale detention sites that functioned less as prisons than as holding facilities for a problem Western capitals chose not to resolve.

Shamima Begum was one of those detainees. After leaving Britain as a teenager to join Islamic State, she was captured by Kurdish forces in early 2019 and held first in al Hol, before being transferred to the smaller, more tightly controlled al Roj camp.

She has never been charged, tried, or sentenced. Her detention is administrative rather than judicial.

Britain did not formally order her detention. But it knew she was being held, refused to take custody of her, stripped her of citizenship, and publicly endorsed the Kurdish system that kept her confined. In legal terms, this was not command, but it was acquiescence.

Dozens of other British or dual national women and their children remain in the same position.

Current reporting suggests that between 19 and 25 British women, alongside around 30 to 35 British children, remain detained in Kurdish run camps in northeast Syria. These are not large numbers by any operational or security standard. Managed repatriation, prosecution where evidence exists, and supervised safeguarding would be well within the capacity of the British state. The persistence of detention therefore appears less a matter of practical impossibility than of political calculation: a reluctance to resolve a small, finite group of cases because doing so carries domestic political cost, even where the security risks are limited and manageable.

The camps exist in a space deliberately left undefined. Kurdish authorities administer them. Western governments rely on them. No state fully accepts responsibility for the people inside.

This arrangement allowed Britain and others to avoid politically toxic decisions about repatriation, prosecution, or long term detention under domestic law. But it also created a system with no durable legal foundation and no guarantee of permanence.

It depended entirely on Kurdish control of territory, continued Western military backing, and the assumption that the regional balance of power would not shift.

That assumption is now collapsing.

Over recent weeks, Kurdish authority across large parts of north east Syria has eroded rapidly. Forces aligned with the Syrian government in Damascus have advanced, Kurdish units have withdrawn, and the security architecture around detention sites has weakened.

At camps including al Hol, detainees have escaped amid unrest and confusion. Kurdish officials describe breakdowns in communication with their American partners and warn that the system they have sustained for years is no longer viable.

There is no declared policy from Damascus explicitly calling for the release of Islamic State detainees. But the collapse of Kurdish control means release, escape, or uncontrolled transfer are now realistic outcomes, whether intended or not.

At the same time, Western policy toward Syria has shifted sharply. Ahmed al Sharaa, once a jihadist commander, is now the de facto president of Syria following the collapse of the previous regime. He has been received as a head of state by regional leaders, welcomed by European officials, and engaged directly by Washington as part of a broader effort to stabilise the country.

Western delegations have travelled to Damascus to meet him. Photographs of Sharaa with senior American and European figures have circulated widely. He is now treated, in practice if not in rhetoric, as a legitimate partner.

This is not framed as endorsement of his past. It is justified as necessity.

But this pragmatic engagement weakens the very Kurdish forces that have, for years, been holding Islamic State detainees on the West’s behalf.

Western governments, including Britain, have long cited genuine security risks in resisting mass repatriation. Many detainees, even low level affiliates or their children, have grown up in highly radicalised environments, with camps such as al Hol widely described by security officials as incubators of extremist ideology. Prosecution on return is often difficult without admissible battlefield evidence, while effective monitoring and deradicalisation are costly and resource intensive. From this perspective, policymakers have argued that leaving detainees in place, however imperfect, reduced the immediate risk of potential threats re entering domestic society.

That logic, however, rested on one assumption: that the camps themselves would remain stable.

Other Western states chose a different course. The United States repatriated its citizens from the camps and has urged allies, including Britain, to do the same. Several European countries have also brought women and children home, prosecuting adults where evidence permits and managing risk domestically where it does not. Britain, by contrast, leaned heavily on citizenship deprivation, a policy ministers judged politically safer than repatriation given the difficulties of prosecution, the expense of monitoring, and the toxicity of the politics. Deprivation became a mechanism for shifting responsibility offshore, even where individuals were born in England and raised as British. That calculus depended on one assumption: that Kurdish run detention centres would remain stable and would keep carrying the burden. As the camps now destabilise, what looked like a solution is rapidly becoming a strategic and legal liability.

The contradiction is now impossible to ignore. A former jihadist commander who led an organisation responsible for killings is rehabilitated when he becomes politically useful. His movement is engaged, normalised, and treated as a governing authority.

At the same time, British nationals who joined jihadist groups remain stripped of citizenship, warehoused in camps, denied prosecution, and denied rehabilitation. This applies even where they were minors. It persists even where no direct violence is proven.

Shamima Begum left Britain as a schoolgirl. She did not command fighters, plan operations, or carry out killings. No court has found that she personally harmed anyone. Yet she remains in legal limbo, confined to a detention system now visibly breaking down.

By contrast, Syria’s new president is treated as a necessary partner, despite his adult leadership of an armed organisation responsible for violence.

The organisations were not identical. Begum joined Islamic State; Sharaa emerged from al Qaeda’s Syrian branch. But they operated in the same war, drew from the same jihadist ecosystem, and killed in parallel against the same enemies.

The West is willing to rehabilitate a leader when state interests demand it, yet unwilling even to process, prosecute, or resolve the status of its own nationals when doing so is politically inconvenient.

The comparison is not one of equivalence, but of contrast. Ahmed al-Sharaa exercised adult command authority in a terrorist organisation responsible for large-scale killing, yet is now rehabilitated for reasons of state. Shamima Begum, who left Britain as a minor and has never been shown to have committed an act of violence, remains indefinitely excluded and warehoused. If rehabilitation is possible at the level of command responsibility, then due process is the minimum owed at the level of peripheral participation.

For years, Britain argued that keeping Islamic State affiliated women and children in Kurdish camps was the safest available option. That claim depended on conditions that no longer exist.

The Kurds, long described as Western allies, are the ones holding Britain’s detainees. But other forces now advancing across the same territory, aligned with the Syrian government and treated as partners by the West, are threatening to dismantle the system altogether.

Avoiding a courtroom reckoning postponed the problem. It did not remove it.

Britain did not refuse Shamima Begum because rehabilitation was impossible. It refused because it was politically easier to leave her in the desert.

Now that desert is disappearing.