Shamima Begum in Roj camp waiting to come back in Britain
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Shamima Begum is back to talk in a new interview featured in a film about Syrian refugee camps. She admits her faults, but denies the assumptions about her working for ISIS moral police. Now Begum rejects ISIS beliefs and asks Britain for a second chance.
In the film, Begum tells she wanted to kill herself after the loss of her three children. Her son died first, but she found the strength to keep on in her firstborn daughter and the baby she was carrying.
A month later her daughter died also of unknown causes.
After this secondo loss, Begum fell into despair and had suicidal feelings:
“When she died it was so hard because I just felt so alone and I felt like my entire world was falling apart in front of me and I couldn’t’ do anything.
‘I felt like it was my fault for not getting them out sooner.
‘When she died at that moment I just wanted to kill myself. I felt like I couldn’t even get up to run any more when there were bombings.
‘The only thing keeping me alive was my baby I was pregnant with. I felt like I had to do him right by getting him out and giving him a normal life”.
In few months she tragically lost also her third child soon after birth.
However, Begum received a piece of good new last summer when she found out that her husband is alive.
Begum, who now is 21, fled from her life in Bethnal Green, East London, to join ISIS in Syria with two other schoolgirls at 15. She claims she was “young and naive” at the time and felt like she knew everything.
Watching videos of bombardments on Syria, she “felt guilty” and close to Muslim who were suffering. She reveals she felt like an outsider in her community and in her family too. So she and her two friends Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana decided to leave UK and join ISIS without exactly knowing what they were getting into.
Although Begum admits she was a teenager who couldn’t distinguish between ISIS propaganda and reality, she denies being part Hisba, ISIS morality police. Begum says that who thinks she’s responsible form crimes of ISIS is wrong: she would never support this sort of actions.
When she realized ISIS hypocrisy, it was too late to run away. Begum reveals she was afraid they’d torture her, if she tried to escape.
Now, she asks Britain to forget her past and give her another opportunity, considering her for who she’s today. Last month, the UK’s Supreme Court forbad her to return to the UK to bring a suit against the withdrawal of her British citizenship.
When asked what she would do first back in UK, she says: “Eat a nice big Subway, a foot long with meatballs”
The interview is part of “The Return: Life After ISIS”, a documentary about woman and children living in detention camps in Northeastern Syria. The aim of the Spanish filmmaker Alba Sotorra Clua was to show the “human face” of the suffering behind ISIS, to encourage a dialogue without judging.
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