ISIL bride seeks return to U.K.

LONDON • A British teenager who ran away to join ISIL has indicated that she is prepared to go to prison if she gets her wish to return to Britain.

Shamima Begum, 19, said that she was still determined to come back from Syria despite knowing that U.K. authorities had the “option” to send her to jail.

In an interview with the BBC Monday, while cradling her newborn baby, the teenager was asked what she thought would happen on her return.

“My first priority is my son, obviously,” she replied. “Because I don’t know whether he’d be taken away from me or they’ll let me keep him or give him to my family while the U.K. decides what to do with me.

“To put me in prison, to put me in a deradicalization course, I don’t know.”

Begum was one of a group of schoolgirls from London’s Bethnal Green neighbourhood who went to Syria to marry ISIL fighters in 2015.

She married a Dutch-born fighter with whom she had three children. Her two eldest children have died of illness and malnutrition, but she reportedly gave birth at a refugee camp in Syria on the weekend.

She said she had been only a “housewife” during her time with militants.

Since she was discovered, she has faced criticism for a lack of remorse, and an apparent reluctance to disavow ISIL teachings.

When asked about the enslavement and rape of Yazidi women by jihadist fighters, she replied: “Shia do the same in Iraq.” Later she likened the deaths of 22 innocent people in the terror attack on an Ariana Grande concert in 2017 to the “women and children” being bombed in Baghuz, where ISIL fighters are making their last stand.

“I do feel that it’s wrong that innocent people did get killed,” she said. “It’s one thing to kill a soldier that is fighting you, it’s self-defence, but to kill people like women and children ...

“Just people like the women and children in Baghuz that are being killed right now unjustly, 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, that is a fair justification.’ ”

“I just want forgiveness really, from the U.K.,” she added. “Everything I’ve been through, I didn’t expect I would go through that. Losing my children the way I lost them, I don’t want to lose this baby as well and this is really not a place to raise children, this camp.”

She admitted her disappearance had been a propaganda coup for ISIL but insisted she did not ask to be the subject of international media attention.