Shamima Begum says public anger is ‘against Isis not her’ in new podcast

Shamim Begum believes any public anger she faces is actually intended towards Isis, the former convert has told a new podcast.

The former British national, who was stripped of her citizenship, said she understands the public now see her “as a danger” and “potential risk to them, to their safety, to their way of living”.

But speaking from the camp in northern Syria where she is still imprisoned, the 23-year-old insisted: “I’m not this person that they think I am”.

In interviews conducted over the space of a year, as she battles to have her citizenship restored, Ms Begum insisted she is “not a bad person”.

“I’m just so much more than Isis and I’m so much more than everything I’ve been through,” she told the first episode of a new BBC series.

Her ongoing legal battle with the Home Office centres around the question of whether she is a victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation, or was open-eyed and committed when she and two other school friends in Bethnal Green chose to leave London to join the terror group.

Her case is the highest-profile of the thousands of people stuck in Syrian prisons since Isis was defeated and scattered in 2019. Ms Begum sought to blame the media focus on her for the anger many in Britain feel towards her.

“I don’t think it’s actually towards me,” she said. “ I think it’s towards Isis. “When they think of Isis they think of me because I’ve been put on the media so much.”

Challenged that the media coverage was a consequence of her decision to join Islamic State, she said: “But what was there to obsess over, we went to Isis that was it, it was over, it was over and done with, what more is there to say?

“Like, they just wanted to continue the story because it was a story, it was the big story.”

A lawyer who represented the girls’ families, Tasnime Akunjee, said he had “never seen anything so thoroughly dry-cleaned of evidence or information as these young teenagers managed to do themselves” after searching their rooms following their disappearance in 2015.

“They must have had a great deal of trust in whoever it is that they were speaking to, to follow that, to follow their advice very, very carefully,” he told the BBC.

Mr Akunjee recalled that the only item found in Ms Begum’s house was a shopping list of items needed for their journey – during which it is claimed that a Canadian spy helped to smuggle them across the Turkish border into Syria.

Denying that the list – which also listed the prices of items and included words in Turkish – was hers, she told the Shamima Begum Story podcast: “We tried so hard to clear up our tracks and just one of us was stupid.”

Ms Begum told the podcast that she and her friends had looked up the cost of items they would need and researched the Turkish language on the internet of their own accord. Put to her that their journey sounded very planned-out, Ms Begum said: “It was, obviously.”

Podcast host Josh Baker reports that Ms Begum told him that she and her friends also looked up Isis members online to help them plan their journey.

Asked whether they bought anything else prior to leaving the UK, Ms Begum said she packed around 30 bars of Aero mint chocolate, joking that it is “a tragedy” it cannot be found in Syria.

“People used to say, ‘pack nice clothes so you can dress nicely for your husband’, but I was like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what that means’,” she added, in a reference to the expectation that they would marry Isis fighters.

Tim Loughton, the Conservative former children’s minister, told broadcaster that public sympathy for Ms Begum when she first went disappeared had increasingly been replaced by anger, claiming many were suspicious she was now “putting on act”.

“I think most people will say that, frankly, we owe her nothing,” he said. “She got herself into this mess and frankly it’s down to her to work out how she’s going to get out of it.”