Shamima Begum: Bring me home, says Bethnal Green girl who left to join Isis

Ms Begum may have reached comparative safety, yet she chastised herself for leaving the last Isis territory as Kurd forces, backed by the West, closed in.

“I was weak,” she told me of her flight from the battle in Baghuz, with something akin to remorse. “I could not endure the suffering and hardship that staying on the battlefield involved. But I was also frightened that the child I am about to give birth to would die like my other children if I stayed on. So I fled the caliphate. Now all I want to do is come home to Britain.”

Ms Begum’s escape from the tumultuous battle in eastern Syria will bring delight to her family in London — and a complex problem to the authorities owing to the uncertainties regarding the legal status of British Isis families.

She and her two fellow pupils, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, left their homes and families in February 2015 to join a fourth Bethnal Green schoolgirl in Syria — Sharmeena Begum, who had left London at the end of 2014 — where each married an Isis foreign fighter. Ms Sultana was reported killed two years ago.

The others, Ms Begum told me as we sat in the al-Hawl refugee camp, had made a different choice to her own, electing to stay on in the last battle at Baghuz.

“They were strong,” she said. “I respect their decision. They urged patience and endurance in the caliphate and chose to stay behind in Baghuz. They would be ashamed of me if they survived the bombing and battle to learn that I had left.”

She added: “They made their choice as single women. For their husbands were already dead. It was their own choice as women to stay.”

The decision of the London schoolgirls, who left stable family backgrounds to become part of the terrorist organisation, shocked Britain and was emblematic of the cult-like attraction that Isis held for hundreds of young jihadist brides from across Europe who flocked to Syria to serve the self-styled caliphate.

In May 2016 Ms Sultana was reported to have been killed in an airstrike on Raqqa, Islamic State’s capital. Shortly afterwards the families of the three surviving girls lost all contact with them, which had been intermittent since their arrival in Syria. At various times since, their relatives have feared that all had died in the war.

Ms Begum said the other two girls were present in the pocket of Isis territory along the Euphrates valley between the towns of Hajin and Baghuz as it shrank to next to nothing over recent weeks under the advance of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

“I last saw my two friends in June,” she said. “But I heard from other women only two weeks ago that the two were still alive in Baghuz. But with all the recent bombing, I am not sure now whether they have survived.”

Since escaping across the frontlines around Baghuz two week ago with her Dutch husband Yago Riedijk, 27, a convert to Islam whom she married ten days after arriving in Raqqa in 2015, she has been held incommunicado in the transit section of al-Hawl camp in northern Syria. To her knowledge the British authorities are unaware of her presence there, and she asked for a message to be relayed to her sister in the UK informing her family that she was still alive.

We sat alone in a courtyard for an hour and a half where she described the fate of the girls after they arrived in Syria. Though the others adapted quickly to life in the caliphate, Ms Begum said her own experience was mixed, and spoke alternately with anger and awe of Islamic State.

After arriving in Raqqa she was put in the “house for women” where newly arrived jihadist brides-to-be waited to be married. “I applied to marry an English-speaking fighter between 20 and 25 years old,” she said. She was the first of the girls to marry, to the Dutchman from Arnhem, while Ms Sultana married an American, Ms Abase an Australian and Sharmeena Begum a Bosnian.

Soon afterwards Shamima Begum received her first reality check, when her husband was arrested and charged with spying. “They imprisoned and tortured him for six and a half months after accusing him of spying,” she said. “There was a lot of similar oppressions of innocent people. In some cases fighters who had fought for the caliphate were executed as spies even though they were innocent.”

Next, Ms Sultana was killed in an airstrike. “There was some secret stuff in the basement of Kadiza’s house,” she said, “which a spy found out about and passed on to the coalition who bombed. I never thought it would happen. At first I was in denial. I thought if ever we did get killed we’d get killed together.”

Her husband, before meeting her, had been wounded fighting in Kobani. Despite the grave charge against him, he was released from prison, but was no longer classified by Isis as a fighter. They continued to live together in Raqqa, where she described life as alternating between normality and atrocity.

“Mostly it was a normal life in Raqqa, every now and then bombing and stuff,” she told me, using the contradictory vernacular common among indoctrinated Isis families. “But when I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam. I thought only of what he would have done to a Muslim woman if he had the chance.”

Her words remained equally harsh when describing the videos she had seen of the beheaded western hostages. “Journalists can be spies too, entering Syria illegally,” she said, mouthing Isis propaganda in the manner of an indoctrinated devotee. “They are a security threat for the caliphate.”

In January 2017 she left Raqqa with her husband to live on the outskirts of the town of Mayadin, where she was later slightly wounded in an airstrike that killed another woman and child in the house. By this time she had her first child, a daughter whom she named Sarayah. But as Isis began to suffer a string of battlefield defeats, culminating in the loss of Raqqa and Mayadin, Ms Begum’s family moved southeast along the Euphrates valley ahead of the SDF advances. By this stage both of her surviving schoolfriends were widows.

“I began to think that the caliphate might not survive after all,” she said, “though my husband urged patience and endurance, and promised me victory would follow setback.”

Yet no victory appeared. For a time the family sheltered in the town of Susah, between Hajin and Baghuz, and the SDF encirclement closed and airstrikes became a daily occurrence.

By now Ms Begum had a son, Jerah. He was the first of her children to die, three months ago aged eight months, of an unknown illness compounded by malnutrition. She took him to the Isis-run hospital in Hajin, to no avail. “There were no drugs available, and not enough medical staff,” she said. “I saw casualties wounded badly by shrapnel who came into the hospital and were told just to go home.”

As the fighting neared, the family moved on to Baghuz. In the febrile atmosphere there, she described Isis families as divided between those determined to stay on and fight, and those intent on fleeing. Now heavily pregnant, as conditions worsened her daughter Sarayah grew sick and died too. She was one year and nine months old when she was buried in Baghuz a month ago.

Though Ms Begum’s husband still urged her to be patient, grief at the loss of her two children accentuated an overwhelming desire to ensure her unborn child survived. “In the end, I just could not endure any more,” she said. “I just couldn’t take it.”

She described how Isis, in its final weeks, gave instructions to the families of all foreign fighters to make their own choices as to whether they stayed on to face the bombing and imminent attack on Baghuz or escape to the desert as best they could. Fleeing the pocket two weeks ago at dawn, she walked out of Baghuz along a three-mile long corridor east of the town, where her husband surrendered to a group of Syrian fighters allied to the SDF. That was the last time she saw him.

Taken on a coach filled with fleeing Isis families to the camp in al-Hawl, Ms Begum now waits to learn of her fate, desperate to return to Britain.

“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 as I have read all that was written about me online. But I just want to come home to have my child. That’s all I want right now. I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child.”