Teenager Who Joined ISIS Wants To Return Home

A British female who left the UK for Syria as a minor in 2015 to join the Islamic State says she has no regrets about joining the terror group but is pleading to return to her country, London-based media reported on Wednesday.

Shamima Begum, along with her schoolmates Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, made headlines in 2015 when they flew from London’s Gatwick Airport to Turkey and then traveled into Syria.

Begum and Abase were both 15 at the time, while Sultana was 16. Two months prior to their journey, two other girls, also from the East London neighborhood of Bethnal Green, also arrived in Syria for the same reason. All of them reportedly married foreign Islamic State militants.

Begum, now nine months pregnant, explained to the Times of London that she initially settled in Raqqa, the Syrian capital of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate.

“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,“ Begum said in an interview conducted in the al-Hawl refugee camp in northeastern Syria.

“Now all I want to do is come home to Britain.”

As the terrorist organization lost more and more ground against the various forces in Syria, the teen and her family moved down along the Euphrates river valley, finally ending up in the last bit of territory the group still controls, Baghouz.

With the Islamic State’s territory dwindling to nothing, more and more members, including females, are surrendering to anti-ISIS forces. Begum said she only decided to flee after both her children – a one-year-old and a three-month-old – died from illness.

“There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they [ISIS] deserved victory,” she said. However, she added, “I don’t regret coming here.”

As far as the backlash Begum will have to face — as a Brit who fled Europe to join ISIS and is now pleading for help in garnering safe passage back — she’s well aware of “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,” she said. “I’ll do anything required just to be able to come home and live quietly with my child.”