A British woman who fled Islamic State
with her five children after travelling to Syria to be with her husband
has told of her experience of life under the group’s rule, describing
the “gangster mentality” among supporters as “not my cup of tea”.
Shukee Begum, who fled Isis and says that she was then held by
smugglers in northern Syria, said that she wanted to return to the UK
but feared what the reception would be from British authorities. She is
currently believed to be living in Syria.
“The UK is my home. I grew up there, my friends are there my family
are there. That is where I consider to be home but I am just not sure at
the moment of the track record of the current government if the UK is
somewhere I can come back to and achieve justice.”
Begum travelled from Manchester
to Syria with her children to find her husband, Jamal al-Harith, a
former Guantánamo Bay detainee who left the UK 18 months ago.
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.
Speaking about the reasons why she left the UK to join al-Harith, she
said: “He’s my husband and all of a sudden he’s not there. It didn’t
feel like home any more. I was trying to manage school runs, things like
that.”
“I was thinking about the children’s futures. Was he part of it? Will he come back? All these things go through your mind.”
Insisting
that she had never been a supporter of Isis, she said that she had
taken her children to Syria because her husband was a family man,
adding: “For me to take the children to see him and then come away from
there that would have been more powerful than anything else I had to say
to him at the time.”
She said that she wanted other women to know about the reality of life in Isis controlled territory.
Begum said: “You have got hundreds of families living in one hall and
sharing perhaps one or two bathrooms between them. You have got
children crying, children who are sick.”
“There was a gangster kind of mentality among single women there.
Violence was talked about, war, killing.
They would sit together, huddle
around their laptops, watch Isis videos. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.”
Begum said that she asked her husband to help her get out, to no avail, and permission to leave was denied by Isis courts.
“This is what I want to make clear as well to other women thinking of
coming into Isis territory – that you can’t just expect to come into
Isis territory and then expect that you can just leave again easily.
There is no personal autonomy there at all.”
After managing to flee, she said that she and the children were held
by smugglers close to the Turkish border and for a number of months in
Aleppo before they were released. The circumstances of her release are
unclear, although according to Channel 4 news, Syrian rebels from the
Nusra Front intervened to facilitate it.
