The taming of Shamima Begum: British teen who joined ISIS wants to come home
Teenagers, eh. They slam doors, get pierced and run off to join ISIS in Syria, where they pledge Holy War, death to Jews, Christians and gays, and champion the subjugation of women, rapes and paedophilia. Shamima Begum, 19, is the British-born bride of an ISIS fighter and nine months pregnant. She wants to come home.
In February 2015, Begum left the UK to join ISIS. The Mail sums it all up in a long headline: “Unrepentant former London schoolgirl, 19, who ran away to join ISIS with two friends flees last-stand battle while ‘nine months pregnant with third baby’ after two more children died in Syrian warzone and begs to come home.”
Got it? You can read more in the Times, which tracked Begum down. The paper’s man in a sandpit finds her “weak and exhausted from her escape across the desert”. She “nevertheless looked calm and spoke with a collected voice.” Can we lend a sympathetic ear to the young woman who left Bethnal Green to see the world (and conquer it by deadly force).
Anthony Loyd, reporting from Al‑ Hawl, Northern Syria, where Begum lives in a refugee camp, then delivers a cinematic moment:
With those words and the act of lifting her niqab, a mystery ended. The girl sitting before me, alone in a teeming Syrian refugee camp of 39,000 people where she is registered as No 28850, was Shamima Begum, the only known survivor of the three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy whose fate has been unknown at home since they fled Britain together in 2015 to join Islamic State.
Where is David Lean when you need him most to overlook the pubescent boys being sold in the market, the slave girls and the murderous racism to focus on the cheekbones and to-die-for pashminas?
And on it goes, the soft focus look at the woman who dared and is now demure. One Guardian writer tells us: “Having been found alive and nine months pregnant in a Syrian refugee camp, Begum is no longer an abstract concept.” What gutless, pliable tosh. An abstract concept doesn’t charge at your mum with a knife.
Security Minister Ben Wallace says Begum “has a right to come home”. He added: “British citizens have rights whoever they are but if they have gone join IS and return to the UK they can expect to be questioned and, if possible, prosecuted… Actions have consequences. I think the public will be reflecting on why these people want to return to a country they said they hate.”
Why? Take a seat. Grab the popcorn:
“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.”
Begum is showing “something skin of remorse” to Times readers. But on LBC radio Dr Kim Howells, a former Foreign Office and Counter-Terrorism Minister, is raging:
“You can bet your bottom dollar there will be a lobby that will swing into action to get this girl home on humanitarian grounds. But she sounds to be completely unrepentant, she sounds cynical, she said she wasn’t phased by the sight of these heads in a bin as she described it. And she sounds well educated. She was obviously deluded by Islamic propaganda and now she wants to take advantage of the NHS. She wants to get back to a country which is the antithesis of this Caliphate that was so attractive for so many people and responsible for so much brutality. There’s not going to be many people with great enthusiasm for bringing her back, but I suspect she will make it in the end.”
Must she sound anything other than herself? The two friends Begum left London with – Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase – also each married an ISIS foreign fighter. Ms Sultana was reported killed two years ago. Here are some more highlights from Begum’s jaunt:
On her Dutch-born husband, a Muslim convert:
“They imprisoned and tortured him for six and a half months after accusing him of spying. 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.”
On city life:
“Mostly it was a normal life in Raqqa, every now and then bombing and stuff,. 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.”
And then the camera zooms in:
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.”
Will there be a sequel?
“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.”
Anything? Names. Places. Dates. And maybe we can swap Begum for one of the Yazidi women enslaved and raped by her old gang? And if they need staff, Begum’s looking for a new career…
Posted: 14th, February 2019 | In: Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
