At 15 she escaped from London to Syria with two friends. She’s trying to get her citizenship back. Today, at 23, the British public broadcaster has offered her to record ten episodes
At 15, she was a little girl who ran away from her London home to join the ISIS Caliphate in Syria. today a 23-year-old whose Bbc offered a ten-part podcast to tell his story: but the story of Shamima Begum one of those that continue to divide British public opinion.
When in 2015 it reached the Islamic Statetogether with two peers with whom he had planned the escape, Shamima was immediately given in marriage to an ISIS militiaman: one of the many child-brides of jihad, only she was more than convinced of it. It has been said that she became part of the Caliphate’s moral police, the one that terrorized women dressed western or of dubious customs; that he went around with a Kalashnikov and even sewed the explosive jackets of kamikaze terrorists.
Shamima had become radicalized online in her East London bedroom: of Bengali Muslim heritage, perhaps she wanted escape an oppressive and conservative familyperhaps harbored a rebellious romantic dream – however violently distorted – of a different life. The fact is that her story caused a sensation: some saw her as a victim, a child who had been brainwashed, some as a dangerous Islamic fanatic.
After the collapse of the Caliphate in 2019Shamima was interned in a refugee camp in Northern Syria. A journalist from the Timesto which the young woman gave a shocking interview: he said he had no regrets and spoke indifferently of the severed heads he had seen in his years with ISIS. She even went so far as to justify the attack in Manchester in 2017, the one at the Ariana Grande concert, which claimed 22 innocent victims.
In reaction, the London government stripped her of her British citizenship, depriving her of the right to return home: since then, she has launched a legal battle to get her passport back and return home. Because over the years you have gone through a radical transformation: if in the first interview you had appeared covered by a black burqa, now she is photographed with her hair down, sunglasses and tight T-shirts. In her own way, she has become a sort of celebrity, sought after by English newspapers and TV.
He also suffered: in the meantime he had three children, all of whom died in swaddling clothes of starvation and disease. She says she’s changed, though she’s never really made amends for her past: but now the Bbc decided to voice her directlyto provide a complete account of what really happened.
A controversial choice: the British broadcaster claims that it is a robust public interest investigation, but has been accused of squandering taxpayers’ money and above all of give a megaphone to a former terrorist that, if he returned to his homeland, he would have to face the rigors of justice.
She, in the first episode of the podcast, tells that The thing she misses most about England is mint chocolate bars: You can find a lot of things in this country – he says – but not the mint chocolate. a tragedy. But perhaps the tragedy was the horrors of ISIS: as he wrote on the Daily Mail a commentator — female and Muslim like Shamima — our sympathy should be reserved for the people enslaved, raped and massacred by those terrorists, rather than for a young woman who has chosen to join them and participate in their brutality.
January 13, 2023 (change January 13, 2023 | 21:27)
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