Shamima Begum Wants to Stand Trial in UK

Shamima Begum was stripped of her UK citizenship in 2019 after she told reporters who found her in a Syrian detention camp that she did not regret having travelled to Syria to marry a jihadist.

Shamima Begum, who left the UK for Syria as a teenager to join Daesh*, told Sky News she wants to go on trial in Britain.

"I'm willing to fight them in a court of law but I'm not being given a chance," she said.

The ex-jihadi wife claims that the only crime she had committed is travelling to Syria.

"I didn't hate Britain, I hated my life really," she said. "I felt very constricted, and I felt I couldn't live the life that I wanted in the UK as a British woman."

According to Begum, who is currently held in a prison camp in Syria, she had been groomed for "weeks and weeks and maybe even months and months” before her final decision to join the terrorist group.

Shamima Begum, who was 15 when she travelled to Syria in 2015 to marry a Daesh terrorist and was later stripped of her UK citizenship, asked the British people to forgive her and said she was prepared to face terror charges in the UK in order to return to her country.

In July 2020, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that Begum should be allowed to return to the UK, but the Home Office subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court.

*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist group banned in Russia.