I’m just a housewife... people should have sympathy for me, says jihadi bride hours after giving birth
As jihadi bride gives birth, her astonishing new interview...
ISIS bride Shamima Begum gave birth to a baby boy yesterday – and hours later pleaded to be allowed to return to the UK, claiming there is no evidence she has done ‘anything dangerous’ while in Syria.
The teenager, from east London, who ran away with two school friends four years ago, insisted she had been ‘just a housewife’ since arriving in Syria and declared that the British public should have ‘sympathy’ for her.
Speaking hours after her third baby was delivered in a refugee camp – her first two, a boy and a girl, died young – unrepentant Begum told of her desire to raise him in the UK and brazenly admitted she had initially had a ‘good time’ under Isis’s socalled caliphate.
Sitting on a plastic chair in a ramshackle office – as another woman in a niqab cradled her baby – the 19-year-old told Sky News: ‘They [the UK authorities] don’t have any evidence against me doing anything dangerous. When I went to Syria I was just a housewife for the entire four years. Stayed at home, took care of my husband, took care of my kids.
‘I never did anything dangerous. I never made propaganda. I never encouraged people to come to Syria as well. They don’t really have proof that I did anything that is dangerous.’
Begum caused shockwaves last week when she emerged in a refugee camp in al-Hawl, northern Syria, four years after she vanished from her home in Bethnal Green. The teenager, who revealed she was nine months pregnant, told how her first two children had died and that her husband Yago Riedijk, a convicted terrorist who police believe was part of a cell plotting an atrocity in Europe, had been arrested.
She insisted: ‘I don’t know where he is. I would like to get in contact with him.’
Her re-appearance sparked a political row, with UK home secretary Sajid Javid saying he would use all his powers to stop British citizens who joined Isis from returning. Last night Begum revealed that before going to Raqqa, the selfstyled capital of the Islamic State, she watched propaganda videos online, at the age of 15, with fellow Bethnal Green Academy pupils Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase.
Asked if she was aware of Isis beheadings and executions, she replied: ‘Yeah, I knew about those things and I was OK with it because I started becoming religious just before I left. From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed so I was OK with it.’
Begum said that life in Syria lived up to her expectations at first. ‘It was nice, it was like how they showed it in the videos, like, “Come, make a family together”, but then afterwards things got harder,’ she said.
Begum ended up in Baghuz, the final Isis enclave, where she received no medical care, had to sleep outside and was ‘starving’.
In a shocking interview recorded just hours after she gave birth yesterday morning, Begum maintained that she had no remorse over joining the terrorist group.
She said: ‘I don’t regret it because it’s changed me as a person. It’s made me stronger, tougher. I married my husband – I wouldn’t have found someone like him back in the UK. I had my kids. I did have a good time there. It’s just at the end things got harder and I couldn’t take it any more. I had to leave.’
But despite her lack of penitence, Begum said she believes she should be able to return to the UK to raise her newborn, named Jerah after her first son, who died of an unknown illness three months ago at the age of eight months. A daughter, Sarayah, died at one year and nine months.
‘I think a lot of people should have sympathy towards me for everything I have been through,’ she said, while struggling to maintain eye contact. ‘I didn’t know what I was getting into when I left. I was hoping that maybe for the sake of me and my child they’d let me come back. Because I can’t live in this camp forever, it’s not really possible.’
Asked if she could be rehabilitated, Begum said: ‘It would be really hard, everything that I have been through, I’m still kind of in the mentality of Dawla [Isis], planes over my head, having the emergency backpack and starving. All of these things. It would be a big shock to go back to the UK and start life again.’
Begum added that she would try to ‘move on’ from everything that has happened in the past four years, provided ‘the UK are willing to take me back and help me start a new life again’.
Last night Tory MP Crispin Blunt, former chairman of the UK’s foreign affairs select committee, said Begum should return to Britain to face justice. He said: ‘There are a number of offences, such as aiding terrorism, she may be guilty of, and she should face trial. And I think there is an obligation on us to relieve Syria.
‘They’ve got a hard enough job at the moment to rebuild the country without us dumping stupid, suggestible and dangerous British fighters on them.’ But Tory MP Robert Halfon said she should be barred from British soil and instead seek asylum in the Middle East. ‘Of course, anyone would have compassion for the individual and her child, but the fact remains that she joined a medieval Nazi death cult that killed many of our citizens and she’s expressed very little remorse or sorrow for what she’s done,’ he said.
‘We need to send a strong signal that anyone who joins an Islamist terror group should not be allowed to come back to this country. That would create a huge disincentive for these people not to join them in the first place. The birth of her child doesn’t change a thing.’
It is understood that should she
‘It was like how they showed it in the videos’
make her way back to Britain, she will face legal proceedings by social services to protect her child. While Begum said she knew that she would face repercussions in the UK, she seemed unaware of the full consequences of her actions, saying: ‘I don’t see any reason why they would take [my child] away from me.’
Last night a family member, who did not want to be named, said of the news of the birth: ‘Fingers crossed, we can just hope for the best right now.’
Muhammad Rahman, 36, whose brother is married to Shamima’s elder sister Renu, told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘Her parents would want custody of the baby. They would want to look after their grandchild.
‘I don’t think people, feeling the way many do about what Shamima has done, would want the state to pick up the burden of looking after the child.’
Begum showed little emotion in the interview, apart from when talking about the family she abandoned in 2015. She said she ignored them when they begged her to return home and that turning to them for help now was like a ‘slap in the face’.
But in a plea to them, she said: ‘Just keep trying to get me back. I really don’t want to stay here.
‘I don’t want to take care of my child in this camp because I’m afraid he might even die.’
Asked about conditions in the refugee camp, she said: ‘It’s OK, I get fed, I have a heater. But it’s kind of difficult getting around doing stuff for yourself, especially now that I have a child.’
But in an apparent concession to the fact that her son could be taken into care if she returned to the UK, the teenager said: ‘That’s just something they have to question me about before they take my child away.’
Last night, Tasnime Akunjee, solicitor for the families of the Bethnal Green girls, said Begum’s family were happy she had given birth to a healthy child but that they were still concerned for his safety. ‘Now we would like to see the British government make every effort to get the baby back. The baby is no threat. She [Shamima] is a British citizen,’ he said.
But Tory MP Tim Loughton, a member of the home affairs committee, said: ‘She has made her bed and should lie in it, particularly as she has shown absolutely no remorse or understanding of the magnitude of what she did.
‘It is essential that if she comes back she is subject to security assessment and possibly prosecution, and her child should be subject to care proceedings because it is at risk of radicalisation.’