Aviator sunglasses perched on her head, flashing fingernails with bright pink nail varnish and wearing a casual shirt, Shamima Begum looks like any young woman her age.
But the 23-year-old Londoner, the former Jihadi bride and member of terrorist group ISIS, is trying to explain why she fled a comfortable family home to join a brutal genocidal regime.
“I thought I was going to an Islamic utopia,” she insists. “I did not know about the atrocities.”
Shamima ran away from London with two friends to join Islamic State in 2015 when she was just 15 years old.
Known as the Bethnal Green girls, the news made global headlines but attempts to track them down failed.
Four years later, pregnant with her third child, Shamima emerged, desperate to come home.
But she showed little remorse and the British Government decided to revoke her British citizenship, leaving her in a Syrian prison camp.
She’s since become infamous - and now in BBC2 documentary tonight, Begum is given an opportunity to explain her story - yet remains a divisive and polarising figure.
Feeling as though she didn’t fit in in Britain, she tells journalist Josh Baker, how she was convinced by her best friend to leave and join ISIS, believing the propaganda.
Describing that day in February 2015 when she left home for Gatwick, she says: “I lied and said I had extra classes to go to. My mum believed me. I said goodbye to her and got on the bus and left. I feel bad not giving her a better goodbye knowing that I’d probably never see her again.”
Shamima describes her journey to Turkey smuggled across the border to Syria as “kind of exciting” and “like a dream”, and says she had turned to religion like her friends “to be accepted”.
However, she says the “dream” quickly vanished. Living in a ‘madafa’, a house for unmarried women, before marrying jihadi fighter Yago Riedijk, Shamima says she was severely restricted and abused.
There are still question marks over Shamima’s involvement in ISIS and whether she was ever trained, learning to recruit people or prepare suicide vests, but she denies this.
Confronted with some of the monstrous crimes of ISIS, including the beheading of US journalist James Foley and British hostage Alan Henning, Shamima claims she was unaware.
She says: “It’s like when you’re in love so you don’t want to see the person’s faults. I made excuses for them.”
Asked how she feels now, she says: “Ashamed of myself for being so stupid, falling for something like this… a lot of regret.”
There are poignant moments in the film that will invite sympathy, especially when she talks about losing all three of her children.
She says: “My son passed away because there was no food. Afterwards my daughter got really skinny and couldn’t stand up, she stopped breathing.
“I was living for her, she kept me going. So when she died my whole world collapsed around me. The only reason I didn’t kill myself is because I was pregnant with my second son.”
Her third child, the reason she begged to return to Britain, later died from pneumonia.
Shamima’s lawyers claim she is a victim of grooming and child trafficking and should be allowed to return. Salman Farsi, former East London Mosque Communications Officer, says: “They were children, they were manipulated.”
But many believe she is dangerous, a traitor and a threat to national security who joined a terror group with her eyes open.
Tim Loughton MP, who examined her disappearance, says: “When you throw your lot in with the devil, don’t expect the niceties of what Western democracies and Western justice stand for.”
It’s the ultimate victim or villain story, with Shamima believing she has wrongly become a face for ISIS.
“ISIS was the worst thing of the 21st century and I was a part of it,” she says on camera. “And now I have to face the consequences of my actions.”
Whether it’s an honest plea for redemption or too little too late will be left for the viewer to decide.
*The Shamima Begum Story, tonight, BBC2, 9pm.
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