Shamima Begum has taken part in her first live interview from the AL-Ros refugee camp in northern Syria.
In a recent interview with ITV, Shamima asks the British public to forgive her.
“I am asking the British people to forgive me” she tells ITV, “because I made a mistake at a very young age”
The former ISIS bride left Britain to join the terror group when she was only 15 years old, marrying an ISIS militant soon after her arrival in Syria.
However, she has since claimed that she had no idea what ISIS was really like, and that she believed she would be traveling to Syria to join an “Islamic Community” instead of what has been described as a “death cult”.
And although Begum has now made numerous attempts to return to Britain, she has been denied entry on security grounds, and in 2019, former home secretary Sajid Javid stripped Begum of her British Citizenship leaving her stateless.
While Javid has since claimed that the decision was “both morally and legally correct and the right one to protect British people”, many people have criticised the move, claiming it was illegal, and raises concerns over how secure the citizenship rights are of British people born to immigrants.
Begum goes on to describe how difficult it was to leave the terror organisation, and that she “had no connection to the outside world” while living in the caliphate.
She also explains how she had feared for the life of her children and how this had made her afraid to leave Syria, but that her children have since passed away as a result of the poor conditions of the refugee camps and says she only has to think of “[her] own safety”.
At the end of the interview Begum claims that she is “trying to better” herself and that she would “rather die than go back to ISIS” and condemning those who are allegedly making false allegations against her, even stating that she would be willing to face them in court in her to prove that she played no active part in carrying out terror attacks.
Whether the interview has helped her attempts at returning home is unclear, however, as while there are many people who believe that believe the British government have a legal duty to facilitate her safe return home, it is also clear that many in Britain are still suspicious of her sincerity.
