British schoolgirl who joined IS wants to return to UK

One of three schoolgirls who left east London in 2015 to join the Islamic State group says she has no regrets but wants to return to the UK.

Shamima Begum, 19, said she fled the jihadists’ last remaining enclave in Baghuz, eastern Syria, as she was tired of life on a battlefield and feared for her unborn child after her two other children died.

“I was weak,” she told the Times from the al-Hawl refugee camp in north-eastern Syria. “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.”

She and two of her fellow Bethnal Green academy pupils, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, flew from Gatwick to Turkey in February 2015, then entered Syria. Begum and Abase were both 15, while Sultana was 16. They had told their parents they were simply going out for the day.

Begum told the Times she initially settled in Raqqa where she married a Dutch convert after three weeks. She said life there alternated between normality and atrocity and added that the sight of a “beheaded head” in a bin had not fazed her.

“Mostly it was a normal life in Raqqa, every now and then bombing and stuff,” she said. “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.”

Begum said her family had moved down the Euphrates valley as Isis retreated, eventually ending up in its final stronghold of Baghuz. But after the deaths of her one-year-old daughter and three-month-old son in recent months from illness and malnutrition, she decided to flee.

She left Baghuz two weeks ago along with a three-mile-long corridor east of Baghuz. Her husband surrendered to a group of Syrian fighters allied to the Syrian Democratic Forces and she has not seen him since, according to the Times.

She said Sharmeena Begum and Abase were believed to have remained in Isis’s final stronghold. “I heard from other women only two weeks ago that the two were still alive in Baghuz,” Shamima Begum said. “But with all the bombing, I am not sure whether they have survived.

“They were strong … 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: “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.”