Jihadi bride: I had to say I backed IS or they’d kill me
ISLAMIC State bride shamima Begum claims she had to say she still supported the jihadist group or she and her baby would have been killed in their syrian camp.
The former east london schoolgirl, now 21, said she ‘had no choice but to say certain things’ to journalists ‘because I lived in fear of these women coming to my tent one day and killing me and killing my baby’.
When she was discovered by a reporter in the al-Hawl refugee camp in 2019, she showed little remorse for running away from her family to join the terror group four years earlier.
‘I don’t regret coming here,’ she said at the time as she talked about how seeing a severed head ‘didn’t faze me at all’. she was then pregnant with a child she would lose. she has lost three babies in all. Now, in a new documentary, she begs to be given a second chance in Britain.
The footage was filmed two years ago, when Begum was 19. she has since been stripped of her British citizenship and lost an appeal in the supreme court to return.
spanish director alba sotorra got rare, extensive access to Begum and other Western women over several months in the Kurdish-run Roj camp, where they remain following the collapse of the Is ‘caliphate’. The footage appears in The Return: life after IsIs, which premiered online last night at the Texas-based south By southwest festival.
‘I would say to the people in the UK, give me a second chance because I was still young when I left,’ Begum told the filmmakers. ‘I just want them to put aside everything they’ve heard about me in the media.’
Begum left her london home aged just 15 to travel to syria with two school friends, and married an Is fighter. a picture emerged this week of her in the camp dressed in Western clothing in a bid to claim she has completely left the terror group.
miss sotorra said: ‘shamima was a piece of ice when I met her. she lost the kid when I was there... it took a while to be able to cry. I think it’s just surviving, you need to protect yourself to survive.’
‘Give me a second chance’