‘All I want to do is come home to Britain’: Ex-London schoolgirl, 19, who ran away to join ISIS with two friends flees while ‘nine months pregnant’ after losing two children in the warzone
A schoolgirl who fled Britain to join Islamic State has been found heavily pregnant in a refugee camp.
Shamima Begum was just 15 when she and two classmates travelled to Syria in February 2015.
She described witnessing beheadings, bombings and the loss of her two infant children as the caliphate fell apart around her.
However the 19-year-old says she does not regret joining the terror group – but now 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 said after being traced to the camp by The Times. ‘And I don’t regret coming here.’
Miss Begum claimed she had been living a normal life despite the atrocities.
The teenager revealed that her first sight of a severed head did not faze her – and she appeared to condone the beheading of Western hostages.
Miss Begum and her friends, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, fled east London in the footsteps of another Bethnal Green schoolgirl, Sharmeena Begum, no relation, who had left the year before. She said each married a IS foreign fighter on reaching Syria.
Miss Begum said her first two children died in infancy.
Disillusioned, the young woman told how she had fled the final IS stronghold fearing that her unborn baby, who she says is due any day, would suffer the same fate.