A British woman who fled the Islamic State (ISIS) group with her five children after travelling to Syria described the experience as “not my cup of tea” in an interview on Wednesday quoted by AFP.
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When she made it to Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, she was sent to a cramped safe house with other foreign women and children before being reunited with her husband.
“It was worse than I expected”. I was thinking about the children’s future.
“There was a gangster kind of mentality among single women there”.
But months after joining him, Begum said that she and her children aged nine, seven, five, three and 11 months, fled Isis-controlled territory and were held for a time by smugglers in Syria’s war-torn city of Aleppo. They would sit together, huddle around their laptops, watch Isis videos. The 33-year-old mother of five has said living in the so-called Islamic caliphate was not her cup of tea.
Ms Begum told the broadcaster she does not support ISIL and instead traveled to the country to look for her husband to try and persuade him to return home. She didn’t think she’d be there for very long. I was trying to manage school runs and things like that. The circumstances of her release are unclear, although according to Channel 4 news, Syrian rebels from the Nusra Front intervened to facilitate it.
Who is Shukee Begum’s husband?
“He’s my husband and all of a sudden he’s not there”.
Jamal al-Harith, a suspected Taliban sympathiser, was flown to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and locked up after being captured in Afghanistan by United States troops in March 2002.
But 18 months ago, when Ms Begum was pregnant with their fifth child, he left their family home to join the jihadists, urging his wife to follow him to Syria.
Begum’s efforts to convince her husband to leave ultimately failed. “She and her children are now in the process of recovering from their ordeal”.
Her passport, as well as the children’s documents and all their money, was “snatched” as soon as she arrived in Syria.
“We were held in a basement prison without any natural sunlight for 86 days”, she said. I grew up there. I’ve always known him to be a good man with good characteristics.
She explained that she took her children to Syria in an attempt to show al-Harith what he was missing in the UK.
“I would love to go back to the UK”.
“I am not Isis, I have never been Isis, and I was hoping that that would be the deciding factor”.
She said that she wanted other women to know about the reality of life in Isis controlled territory.
A report released last month indicated dozens of fighters have defected from the group, notorious for beheadings and blowing up ancient monuments, due to disillusionment over killing fellow Sunni Muslims and civilians.
“They demonstrate that [ISIS] is not the jihadist utopia that the group’s videos promise; and that many of its own fighters have deep concerns about the group’s strategy and tactics”.
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Hundreds of Britons are thought to have travelled to join ISIS jihadists over the past year.
