Jihadi bride: Let me back ... I’d love to help others
WEARING a leather Nike baseball cap and skinny jeans, jihadi bride Shamima Begum has insisted she does not need to be rehabilitated.
In fact she would ‘love’ to help rehabilitate others, she said.
The 21-year- old former East London schoolgirl was speaking during an interview at al-Roj prison camp in Syria, again showing off her slick new western image seen in other recent encounters with the media.
With fingernails painted red as she held a fashionable clutch bag, she now looks very different from her previous image as a jihadi bride in hijab and head scarf, inset below.
Begum, who left Britain to join Islamic State when she was 15 in 2015, remains in the camp stripped of her UK citizenship.
In her latest interview there, she told journalist Andrew Drury: ‘I don’t think I was a terrorist. I think I was just a dumb kid who made one mistake.
‘I personally don’t think that I need to be rehabilitated, but I would want to help other people be rehabilitated. I would love to help.’
Explaining why she had stopped wearing her traditional Islamic dress, she said: ‘I wear these clothes, and I don’t wear a hijab, because it makes me happy. And anything in this camp that makes me happy is like a lifesaver.’
She added that she liked rapper Kanye West’s music, was following news of his divorce from reality TV star Kim Kardashian and watched reruns of Friends in the camp.
After running away from her home in Bethnal Green with two other schoolgirls to go to Syria, Begum married a Dutch jihadi.
She had three children who all died of disease or malnutrition before she arrived at al-Roj. Her husband is thought to be in a Kurdish-run prison in Syria.
As recently as 2019, Begum refused to condemn the Manchester arena bombing in which 22 were murdered. And in another interview she said that seeing her first severed head in Syria ‘didn’t faze me at all’.
But Mr Drury, interviewing her for a film called Danger Zone, said meeting her had changed his mind about her being a terrorist and that she should be allowed to return to the UK and serve time for her crimes.
Earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled on national security grounds that she cannot return to Britain to appeal against the removal of her citizenship in 2019. At the end of the interview, Mr Drury, a married father-of-four, shared an embrace with Begum after she asked him for a hug. ‘We were about to say goodbye and I didn’t know the protocol because bear in mind she is there as a terrorist,’ he said. ‘I went to shake her hand and she started to cry and said to me, “Can I have a hug?”’ He added: ‘This girl is a vulnerable 21-year-old who did something unbelievably stupid. It was a childish mistake from a 15-year-old.’ Asked what she would say to those in the UK who do not want her to return, Begum said: ‘Can I come home please, pretty please?’
‘I was just a dumb kid’