A nine-months-pregnant British teen who left east London along with two other schoolgirls in 2015 to join ISIS in Syria said Thursday that she has no regrets — but now wants to return home for her baby.
Shamima Begum, 19, one of three students from the Bethnal Green Academy who traveled to Syria via Istanbul, Turkey, four years ago, told The Times of the UK that she worries about the health of her unborn child.
“In the end, I just could not endure any more,” she told the paper from a refugee camp after fleeing the collapse of the terror group’s self-styled caliphate.
“I just couldn’t take it. Now all I want to do is come home to Britain,” she added.
Begum said her two previous children died in the past three months — a daughter, Sarayah, who had become sick, and a son, Jerah, whose death was linked to malnutrition.
Kadiza Sultana, who also traveled with her to the terror group’s self-styled caliphate, is believed to have been killed by an airstrike in Raqqa in 2016.
Their other classmate, Amira Abase, was in the village of Baghuz, along with Sharmeena Begum, also from Bethnal Green, who traveled to Syria two months before the trio but is not related to Shamima.
All four married foreign ISIS fighters.
“I heard from other women only two weeks ago that the two were still alive in Baghuz,” Begum said. “But with all the bombing, I am not sure whether they have survived.”
Baghuz fell to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurd-majority force backed by the West that has fought the jihadists with the help of American airstrikes.
“I don’t regret coming here,” she said, adding that she was “weak” to have left the group and saluted the young woman who stayed.
Life in Raqqa, married to a Dutchman, had been largely “normal,” she said, and seeing her first severed head in a bin “didn’t faze me at all.”
But the jihadists’ oppression and corruption meant that “I don’t think they deserved victory.”
Begum said she realized she might return to a hostile reception.
“I know what everyone at home thinks of me as I have read all that was written about me online,” she said. “But I just want to come home to have my child. I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child.”
But her path back to her homeland remains uncertain after British Security Minister Ben Wallace said that “actions have consequences,” insisting he would not put workers’ lives at risk to rescue citizens who joined ISIS.
“I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state,” he told BBC Radio 4’s “Today,” according to The Guardian.
Sir Peter Fahy, former head of the Greater Manchester police, told the program that “the biggest challenge if she did come back will be how the police will keep her safe and how she wouldn’t be some sort of lightning rod for both Islamic and far-right extremists.”
He added: “If she still holds those views, that’s clearly going to be an enormous challenge and you can understand why the government is not particularly interested in facilitating her return.”