British teen Shamima Begum, who fled to join ISIS, wants to come home “I’m not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago,” she told The Times. “And I don’t regret coming here.”By Alexander Smith
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/british-teen-shamima-begum-who-fled-join-isis-wants-come-n971446
“Officially, it is U.K. policy to tell British women in this situation to get themselves to the nearest consulate to be repatriated. Unofficially, the government “would rather they did not come back,” Gardham said. “They don’t want jihadi brides back and they don’t want jihadis back.”
A British teenager who fled her home and joined the Islamic State in Syria says she now wants to come home — not because she is remorseful for joining the violent extremist group but so her unborn child will be safe.
The case of Shamima Begum will be seen as part of a wider dilemma for Western governments about what to do with people who want to return now that ISIS’ control of swaths of Iraq and Syria has all but dissolved.
Begum, 19, was one of three British schoolgirls who abandoned their lives in east London almost overnight in 2015, traveling to join ISIS and each marrying a group militant.
Her fate was largely unknown until Thursday when the British newspaper The Times tracked her down in a refugee camp. She said she wanted to come home but said she wasn’t sorry.
“I’m not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago,” she told The Times, referring to her neighborhood in East London. “And I don’t regret coming here.”
Begum, who told the Times she is nine months pregnant, is like thousands of people all over the world who were lured by ISIS propaganda to join the militant movement then marauding the Middle East and beyond.
Once her trio arrived in Syria, they joined a fourth friend already there who also married an ISIS fighter, Begum said. One of the girls was killed in an airstrike, and the other two elected to stay on for what could be the militants’ final stand in a battle at the town of Baghuz, near the Iraqi border, she said.
It is not clear whether the girls were ever combatants, no how deep their support for the group went. But now that ISIS has lost almost all of its territory, Western intelligence services worry about what to do with these so-called foreign fighters and their families once they return home.
The fear is that they could try to mount attacks once back in their homelands, or at least stir up support for a cause they may claim to have renounced. Attempting to monitor them represents a huge burden for governments.
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