Shamima Begum left the UK in 2015, aged 15
(Picture: PA Media)Shamima Begum has said she accepts that she joined a terror group when she left Britain as a teenager to join the Islamic State, and said she understands public anger towards her.
Ms Begum was stripped of her British citizenship as a national security risk, after she travelled to Syria in 2015 when she was 15 years old.
In an account of her escape to Syria from Gatwick Airport, the now 23-year-old told BBC podcast The Shamima Begum Story that she expected to never return.
She said she knows that the public see her as a potential risk to their safety, but she claimed: “I’m not this person that they think I am.”
“I’m just so much more than ISIS and I’m so much more than everything I’ve been through,” she told the podcast.
She revealed that preparation for joining Islamic State in Raqqa involved her own research - such as travel costs and learning Turkish - as well as explicit instructions from the group’s members.
She left the UK with two other girls from Bethnal Green, east London.
Ms Begum said people were online advising the girls with a long list of detailed instructions on how to join IS, as well as the cover story to use if they were caught.
She told the podcast that her family thought she was “too weak to do something so crazy” and that she has always been a “more secluded person”.
A lawyer who represented the families of the girls, Tasnime Akunjee, told the BBC a shopping list was left behind by one of the girls, which included what they needed for the trip and costs, such as a phone, taxi and socks.
Ms Begum is in a legal battle with the Home Office in the hopes she can return to London and have her British citizenship restored.
The tribunal hearing has centred around whether she was a victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation, or a committed IS volunteer who poses a threat to the UK.
The Home Office said in Ms Begum’s hearing that people who are trafficked to Syria and “brainwashed” can still be threats to national security.
Ms Begum’s barrister Samantha Knights KC said her client had been the victim of a “determined Islamic State propaganda machine”.
Her British citizenship was revoked on national security grounds shortly after she was found, nine months pregnant, in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019.
Ms Begum had three children in Syria, all of whom have died.
