ISIS bride Shamima Begum reveals she considered taking her own life when her daughter was killed
Shamima Begum said she wanted to commit suicide after the death of her young daughter – only not taking her life because she was pregnant with her third child.
The ISIS bride, 23, lost an attempt last week to overturn the decision to revoke her British nationality, but has vowed to appeal the verdict to try and get her to return to Britain.
Last year it turned out that Begum told a journalist that the death of her three children ‘does not make me sad’.
However, in the latest episode of the controversial BBC podcast series, The Shamima Begum Story, she described the loss as feeling like ‘my whole world came crashing down’.
Begum, who was just 15 when she signed up for the terror group in 2015 with two friends from Bethnal Green in East London, spoke of her experience as ISIS began to loosen its stranglehold on Raqqa.
Shamima Begum said she wanted to commit suicide after the death of her young daughter – only not taking her life because she was pregnant with her third child.
The ISIS bride, 23, who last week lost an attempt to reverse the decision to revoke her British nationality, which prevented her from returning to Britain, spoke of the difficulties of raising her family during the fighting in Syria
The heavily pregnant mother, together with husband Yago Riedijk and their two children, set sail for Baghuz, the last stronghold of the jihadist group.
However, they soon ran out of money and supplies, and in their desperation often had to stay in boarding houses with women sleeping in corridors and children spreading disease.
Begum’s own son and daughter became increasingly malnourished and both died in infancy.
Speaking of her daughter on today’s podcast, Begum said, “She was my world, she was my reason for going through everything, through ISIS and my husband’s abuse.
“She just kept me going. I lived for her, I lived for no one but her.
So when she died it was like my whole world came crashing down around me.
“It’s hard being a mom who has to wake up and do all these things for her kids to wake up and not have anyone who needs you.
‘Obviously the only reason I didn’t kill myself was because I was pregnant with my second son. If I hadn’t been pregnant I would have taken my own life.’
After fleeing the UK in 2015, Begum married a 23-year-old ISIS fighter ten days after arriving in Syria, where she is staying in a camp in the north of the country.
Her British citizenship was revoked on national security grounds by former Home Secretary Sajid Javid shortly after she was found nine months pregnant in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019.
Last year it emerged that Begum told a journalist that the death of her three children ‘doesn’t make me sad’
Begum challenged the Home Office to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), where her lawyers argued that she should be allowed to return to Britain because she was ‘a victim of child sex trafficking’.
However, the Home Office defended the decision, saying security services “continue to assess” that she poses a risk to the UK.
Last week she lost a new lawsuit against the removal of her citizenship, with judges ruling that while there was a ‘credible suspicion’ that Ms Begum had been trafficked to Syria for ‘sexual exploitation’, this was not enough to allow her appeal to succeed. Her lawyers have vowed to appeal the ruling.
She was backed this week by the government’s terror watchdog, Jonathan Hall KC, who argued that British women should be able to return to the UK from Syria.
Speaking at King’s College London, Mr Hall said the UK government’s policy of revoking citizenship and limiting aid to British citizens in Syria is “at a crossroads”.
He said the risk posed by ISIS has changed and the UK is now “in the spotlight” as other countries begin to repatriate their citizens.
In today’s podcast episode, Begum recalls the chaos of having to keep moving towards Baghuz as the fighting intensified.
“It was so hard because at that point I knew and everyone knew there was nowhere else to run,” she said.
“This was the last place, there was no plan B. We either die here or we leave. And people tried to leave all the time.
In the latest episode of the controversial BBC podcast series The Shamima Begum Story, she described the loss as feeling like ‘my whole world came crashing down’.
My son and daughter had passed away. I was really depressed.
‘I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to get up and run from the bombs and the fighting. I just wanted to slide down and die. But my husband kept urging me to get up and go.
‘We walked from sunrise to sunset and I was heavily pregnant and also severely malnourished.
“We didn’t know where we were walking, we just followed the person at the front until we finally met these soldiers.”
At the time, ISIS spread rumors that the Kurdish and Arab forces would torture anyone they captured, the podcast reports.
Begum explained how she told her husband, “I’d rather be beaten and tortured and raped than die for these people.”
The episode also references her comments in 2019 when she said she was “not shocked” by the sight of a severed head in a garbage bag.
Questioned again by the BBC about her comments, Begum said: ‘I didn’t see the blood on the street, I didn’t notice it.
‘Apparently they had done the execution in the street, then put the heads in the garbage bags and just left them under the stairs.
“My husband wanted to scare me, I think because he knew I had never seen anything like it. I was shocked, but I just didn’t know what to say.
“I had seen beheading videos, but it’s not the same as seeing it in real life. I can still remember the smell, it was very strong.
“I held my daughter in my arms at the same time, thinking I should protect her from this, but I can’t do anything.
‘It caused me to sink into myself more and more.’