Pregnant Isil bride seeks UK return
A BRITISH schoolgirl who fled to Syria to join Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) has said she does not regret it, but wants to return to the UK to give birth.
Shamima Begum, 19, vanished from her home in Bethnal Green in London four years ago, along with two other teenage girls, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase.
A girl who identified herself as Ms Begum was found in a refugee camp in Syria as the Isil caliphate collapsed.
In an interview with The Times newspaper she described how she had been living in the caliphate and had married an Isil fighter from the Netherlands called Yago Riedijk. She was heavily pregnant and due to give birth any day.
The girl is living in the al-hawl refugee camp in northern Syria along with 39,000 other refugees.
She described having seen a severed head in a bin during her time with Isil and how she had survived bombing raids.
The teenager also said she had already given birth to two children, both of whom died in infancy.
“I’m not the same silly little 15-yearold schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago,” she told The Times. “And I don’t regret coming here.”
She added: “I am scared this baby is going to get sick in this camp. That’s why I want to get back to Britain, because I know my baby will be looked after.”
The three girls had joined Sharmeena Begum, another London teenager, in Syria. All were married off to jihadists. Shamima Begum said at least one of her friends, Kadiza Sultana, had been killed when a bomb hit a house in Raqqa.
The other two girls reportedly stayed on to fight in Baghuz in eastern Syria, along with a few hundred Isil fighters, as the caliphate came to an end. Shamima Begum and her husband fled instead, and the husband surrendered to Kurdish forces.
The girl said she had spoken to her mother in the UK and asked for her support when she goes home.
She had also read what had been written about her online by people back in the UK.
“The caliphate is over,” she said. “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they deserved victory. I know what everyone at home thinks of me.
“But I just want to come home to have my child. All I want to do is come home to Britain.”
The Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces are expected to announce the territorial defeat of Isil in the coming days. Around 2,000 US special forces are expected to be brought home by April.
Giving evidence to MPS in the wake of the British schoolgirls’ disappearance, in 2015, senior police officers said they would not be treated as criminals if they returned home to the United Kingdom.
They said there was a “difference between the person running around with a Kalishnikov” and three schoolgirls who had been duped into travelling to Syria.
The girls funded their travel to Syria by stealing jewellery from relatives, paying more than £1,000 in cash to a local travel agent for their flights to Turkey.
‘I’m not the silly little 15-year-old girl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago’