Express reporter Richard Ashmore travelled to Syria to speak with Shamima Begum – but it did not go to plan
Tell anyone you’ve met Shamima Begum, Britain’s most infamous ISIS bride, and you’re guaranteed one of two responses; one is often along the lines of “she was just a schoolgirl, she was only 15 and she was groomed”, or the view may come from the other side of the spectrum, when people say “she got what she deserved, she’s a terrorist, we don’t want her coming back here”.
If I’m honest, I have experienced both views vying for supremacy in my own mind.
But meeting Shamima again earlier this month, I feel like I’ve finally reached a conclusion beyond all the debate and opinions.
When she came into the meeting room at al-Roj camp in northeast Syria she seemed thin and her eyes looked sunken. There’s still an adolescent naivety about the 26-year-old, but there is also a very real sense she is frustrated and angry at her ongoing incarceration. All of her legal attempts to overturn having her UK citizenship removed have failed.
Shamima’s mood seemed to change suddenly when I started asking some simple questions.
She dismissively gave me ‘no comment’ answers when I asked about her chances of getting home, which could be higher now under Donald Trump than ever before.
Instead, Shamima asked me if I had anything to tell her, as if the world still owed her something despite the choices she had made.
As she stormed out of the meeting I was torn between thinking here was a woman who had lost hope, to feeling here was someone throwing a tantrum like a petulant teenager.
Like the thousands of other foreign-born former ISIS brides in al-Roj, Shamima has no time limit on her ‘sentence’, a situation which one detainee told me was ‘driving women mad’. All those held at al-Roj have been there since at least 2019 when ISIS was defeated by US, British and coalition forces.
Shamima Begum in Syria (Image: Shamima Begum )
Richard Ashmore inside the camp (Image: Tim Merry/Staff Photographer)
Has Shamima lost her mind? I don’t think so. But what can’t be denied anymore is that she and other Brits and foreigners held in Syria can’t stay there forever.
Like President Donald Trump’s administration has said, it may be time for Western nations to accept responsibility for our former citizens because quite frankly no one else wants them, and in my view, whatever your opinion about Shamima, the reality is she was born and raised in Britain.
And that means, we don’t get to decide if she is British or not. It’s the same reason we could not strip the vile paedophile Gary Glitter of his citizenship for the sick crimes committed in the Far East.
If someone is British, we are responsible for them as a nation, whether they are a hero, or the worst kind of villain.
