‘I was groomed’: Shamima Begum insists she ‘didn’t hate Britain’ when she fled to Syria – and now wants to face trial in UK
Shamima Begum, the Bethnal Green schoolgirl who fled to Syria and joined IS, has told Sky News she was groomed by friends and older men she met online before joining the terror group.
Speaking from a prison camp in Syria, Begum said she wanted to go on trial in the UK and invited British officials to question her in prison.
And she said that when she left the UK in 2015 she “didn’t hate Britain”, but hated her life as she felt “very constricted”.
In a wide-ranging interview, Begum spoke about her experiences with Islamic State and life in Syria.
Begum, now 22, said she wanted to go on trial in the UK
“Can I keep my mask on?” Shamima Begum asks before the interview starts. “I’m looking ugly today.”
Begum now speaks with a soft American twang and little trace of her east London upbringing.
She wears yoga leggings, a pink sweatshirt, black baseball cap and a small handbag across her chest.
In almost any other context, she would be utterly unremarkable, but this is a prison camp in northeast Syria and Begum, now free of her strict black Islamic State dress, remains a captive of her notorious past.
She left home in London aged 15 for the promise of paradise, instead she found “hell, hell on Earth”.
Begum rejects accusations that she carried out atrocities as part of IS as “all completely false”.
“I’m willing to fight them in a court of law but I’m not being given a chance.”
She wants to do that in Britain but expects to go to prison even though the only crime she admits to committing is travelling to Syria itself.
Begum now believes she was groomed for “weeks and weeks and maybe even months and months. It wasn’t just a decision I made very quickly, it was a decision I thought about for a while.”
“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.”
She told Sky’s Alistair Bunkall: ‘I didn’t hate Britain, I hated my life really. I felt very constricted.’
There is a childlike shyness to her, still. She rarely makes eye contact as we talk, often looking downwards and away; she interlinks her hands down by her waist, unconsciously closing her body a little as she answers my questions.
Perhaps she is a good actress, turning it on for the camera, but my instinct is that she is every bit as young and naive as you might expect of her 22 years. Naive, but not necessarily innocent.
Begum and I walk around al Roj camp together – mud and sand streets lined by white tents provided by the UN.
Begum is worried about recent fires, scared that her high profile will make her a target for inmates wanting to make a name for themselves.
“For a long time it [the camp] wasn’t violent but for some reason it’s become more scary to live here.
“Maybe the women have got tired of waiting for something,” she reasons.
We talk about her family – she misses them but doesn’t currently speak to them: “I don’t think they failed me, in a way I failed them. When the time is right, I want to reconcile.”
Begum said: ‘It’s hard to think about a future when everyone tells you that you’re not going to go back’
I ask her about her future: “It’s hard to think about a future when everyone tells you that you’re not going to go back.”
And she brings up her Dutch husband, the father of her three dead children, who fought for Islamic State and recently spoke about their “beautiful life” together.
Are they still officially married? “Yes.”
Does she sympathise with him? “No.”
Does she miss him? “No.”
Begum tells me that she rarely watches television but does have a stack of books in her tent, her favourites are by the Afghan author Khalid Hosseini. “I re-read the Kite Runner but I don’t know why people keep giving me books about war.”
By herself, she eats dried noodles, but is “having friends round to her tent for supper tomorrow night”. She won’t cook herself, instead she will buy it in from another woman on camp.
“I have hopes and dreams, things I want to do, to see,” she says, but won’t expand when I push her.
One of her friends, a Dutch prisoner called Hafedda Haddouch, tells me Begum often hides away in her tent for weeks. But Begum insists she’s not suicidal, when I ask her.
Begum and Bunkall walked around al Roj camp together – mud and sand streets lined by white tents provided by the UN
The small group of women are clearly Shamima’s support. They giggle and pose for photos, as vain as you would expect of anyone that age.
For some, Begum is a cause célèbre, unfairly imprisoned without trial and an example of a heartless Conservative government. For others, she is a terrorist, who still poses a threat to national security and should never be allowed back into the country of her birth.
Such is the visceral hatred of many in that quarter, you wonder whether a return to the UK would be wise at all for Begum.
Bangladesh, the country with which the UK claims she held dual-nationality, has rejected any association with her.
“There is no Plan B,” is her answer when I ask what she will do if the British government doesn’t reverse its position and reinstate her citizenship.
Shamima Begum was 15 when she fled to Syria
Have any British officials or lawyers visited her in prison? “Never” she claims.
Her opinion towards the media is conflicted – she blames past interviews and reporting “100%” for her current limbo, but also believes a high profile remains her only hope of release. There’s probably some truth in both those positions.
Almost a third of Shamima Begum’s life has now been lived in Syria. She is being held in prison, for an indeterminate amount of time, but hasn’t yet stood trial. That much is fact.
If she had been repatriated the day the caliphate fell, she might already be some considerable way through a guilty sentence, but the British government decided she was a risk to national security, a decision the Supreme Court upheld.
She has been disowned by the country she grew up in, cut off from the family she grew up with, and is now part of a prison population that is becoming an increasingly unsustainable burden on the Kurdish authorities who guard them.
Shamima Begum is the woman that nobody wants, and she knows it. When she closes her eyes at night she says she is haunted by “my children dying, the bombings, the constant running, my friends dying”.
Begum has already been judged, albeit only in court of public opinion, and for now, she is going nowhere.
The Shamima Begum interview was produced by Andrew Drury and Zein Ja’far and filmed by Jake Britton.
Hundreds of UK online safety workers at TikTok have already signed agreements to leave the company, whistleblowers have told Sky News, despite the firm stressing to MPs that the cuts were “still proposals only”.
More than 400 online safety workers have agreed to leave the social media company, with only five left in consultation, Sky News understands.
“[The workers have] signed a mutual termination agreement, a legally binding contract,” said John Chadfield, national officer for the Communication Workers’ Union.
“They’ve handed laptops in, they’ve handed passes in, they’ve been told not to come to the office. That’s no longer a proposal, that’s a foregone conclusion. That’s a plan that’s been executed.”
Moderators gathered to protest the redundancies
In August, TikTok announced a round of mass layoffs to its Trust and Safety teams.
“Everyone in Trust and Safety” was emailed, said Lucy, a moderator speaking on condition of anonymity for legal reasons.
After a mandatory 45-day consultation period, the teams were then sent “mutual termination agreements” to sign by 31 October.
Sky News has seen correspondence from TikTok to the employees telling them to sign by that date.
“We had to sign it before the 31st if we wanted the better deal,” said Lucy, who had worked for TikTok for years.
“If we signed it afterwards, that diminished the benefits that we get.”
Three former moderators at TikTok have spoken to Sky News on camera
Despite hundreds of moderators signing the termination contracts by 31 October, Ali Law, TikTok’s director of public policy and government affairs for northern Europe, said to MPs in a letter on 7 November: “It is important to stress the cuts remain proposals only.”
“We continue to engage directly with potentially affected team members,” he said in a letter to Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the science, innovation and technology committee.
After signing the termination contracts, the employees say they were asked to hand in their laptops and had access to their work systems revoked. They were put on gardening leave until 30 December.
“We really felt like we were doing something good,” said Saskia, a moderator also speaking under anonymity.
“You felt like you had a purpose, and now, you’re the first one to get let go.”
TikTok moderators and union workers protested outside the company’s London headquarters in September
A TikTok worker not affected by the job cuts confirmed to Sky News that all of the affected Trust and Safety employees “are now logged out of the system”.
“Workers and the wider public are rightly concerned about these job cuts that impact safety online,” said the TUC’s general secretary, Paul Nowak.
“But TikTok seem to be obscuring the reality of job cuts to MPs. TikTok need to come clean and clarify how many vital content moderators’ roles have gone.
“The select committee must do everything to get to the bottom of the social media giant’s claims, the wider issues of AI moderation, and ensure that other workers in the UK don’t lose their jobs to untested, unsafe and unregulated AI systems.”
Moderators and union representatives outside TikTok’s offices
What TikTok has said about the job cuts
In an interview with Sky News on 18 November, Mr Law again called the cuts “proposals”.
When asked if the cuts were in fact a plan that had already been executed, Mr Law said there was “limited amounts” he could directly comment on.
TikTok told us: “It is entirely right that we follow UK employment law, including when consultations remained ongoing for some employees and roles were still under proposal for removal.
“We have been open and transparent about the changes that were proposed, including in detailed public letters to the committee, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.”
The three whistleblowers Sky News spoke to said they were concerned TikTok users would be put at risk by the cuts.
The company said it will increase the role of AI in its moderation, while maintaining some human safety workers, but one whistleblower said she didn’t think the AI was “ready”.
“People are getting new ideas and new trends are coming. AI cannot get this,” said Anna, a former moderator.
“Even now, with the things that it’s supposed to be ready to do, I don’t think it’s ready.”
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Is TikTok improving safety with AI?
Lucy also said she thought the cuts would put users at risk.
“There are a lot of nuances in the language. AI cannot understand all the nuances,” she said.
“AI cannot differentiate some ironic comment or versus a real threat or bullying or of a lot of things that have to do with user safety, mainly of children and teenagers.”
TikTok has been asked by MPs for evidence that its safety rates – which are currently some of the best in the industry – will not worsen after these cuts.
The select committee says it has not produced that evidence, although TikTok insists safety will improve.
“[In its letter to MPs] TikTok refers to evidence showing that their proposed staffing cuts and changes will improve content moderation and fact-checking – but at no point do they present any credible data on this to us,” said Dame Chi earlier this month.
“It’s alarming that they aren’t offering us transparency over this information. Without it, how can we have any confidence whether these changes will safeguard users?”
Dame Chi Onwurah speaks at the House of Commons. File pic: Reuters
TikTok’s use of AI in moderation
In an exclusive interview with Sky News earlier this month, Mr Law said the new moderation model would mean TikTok can “approach moderation with a higher level of speed and consistency”.
He said: “Because, when you’re doing this from a human moderation perspective, there are trade-offs.
“If you want something to be as accurate as possible, you need to give the human moderator as much time as possible to make the right decision, and so you’re trading off speed and accuracy in a way that might prove harmful to people in terms of being able to see that content.
“You don’t have that with the deployment of AI.”
As well as increasing the role of AI in moderation, TikTok is reportedly offshoring jobs to agencies in other countries.
Sky News has spoken to multiple workers who confirmed they’d seen their jobs being advertised in other countries through third-party agencies, and has independently seen moderator job adverts in places like Lisbon.
John Chadfield, national officer for technology at the Communication Workers Union
“AI is a fantastic fig leaf. It’s a fig leaf for greed,” said Mr Chadfield. “In TikTok’s case, there’s a fundamental wish to not be an employer of a significant amount of staff.
“As the platform has grown, as it has grown to hundreds of millions of users, they have realised that the overhead to maintain a professional trust and safety division means hundreds of thousands of staff employed by TikTok.
“But they don’t want that. They see themselves as, you know, ‘We want specialists in the roles employed directly by TikTok and we’ll offshore and outsource the rest’.”
Mr Law told Sky News that TikTok is always focused “on outcomes”.
He said: “Our focus is on making sure the platform is as safe as possible.
“And we will make deployments of the most advanced technology in order to achieve that, working with the many thousands of trust and safety professionals that we will have at TikTok around the world on an ongoing basis.”
Asked specifically about the safety concerns raised by the whistleblowers, TikTok said: “As we have laid out in detail, this reorganisation of our global operating model for Trust and Safety will ensure we maximize effectiveness and speed in our moderation processes.
“We will continue to use a combination of technology and human teams to keep our users safe, and today over 85% of the content removed for violating our rules is identified and taken down by automated technologies.”
*All moderator names have been changed for legal reasons.
UK
Four mayoral elections to be postponed – as Labour accused of ‘scandalous attempt to subvert democracy’
Four mayoral elections due to take place in May 2026 are set to be postponed by two years, Sky News understands.
Elections for the new mayoralties of Essex, Hampshire and the Solent, Sussex and Brighton, and Norfolk and Suffolk will be pushed back until 2028.
The decision, first revealed by The Sun, is due to be announced by ministers on Thursday.
This is the second time elections are being delayed in these areas. Local elections due in May 2025 were delayed by then communities secretary Angela Rayner for a year in order to convert them into combined authorities led by mayors.
However, it is understood that these councils need more time to complete their reorganisation.
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Will Tories and Reform unite?
The news has sparked accusations Labour are delaying the elections for political purposes.
Reform UK’s head of policy Zia Yusuf said: “This is a blatant attempt to stop big Reform wins next May.
“It’s an act of a desperate government who are clinging onto power by any means necessary.
“Labour has proven time and time again that they’re not beyond denying democracy to millions of people in order to maintain their cosy status quo.”
Pic: PA
The Tories’ shadow housing secretary James Cleverly said it was a “scandalous attempt to subvert democracy by a Labour government whose credibility and popularity are already in tatters”.
“The Conservatives firmly oppose this decision to delay the mayoral elections, especially when candidates have been selected and campaigning is well under way,” he added.
“Democracy is being denied yet again after the council elections cancelled by Labour this year.
“There is no credible justification for this move. The Labour government must reverse it immediately.”
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Starmer denies misleading voters
The reorganisation is part of Labour’s manifesto commitment to widen devolution, which it argues will improve local economies.
The government wants to abolish the two-tier system of county and district councils and merge them together to create larger unitary authorities. It also wants more areas to have regional mayors, like Greater Manchester’s Andy Burnham.
Read more:
Tory-Reform pact talks ‘not happening at any level’
Reeves hit by Labour rebellion
Reform UK enjoyed success in the local elections in May, winning more than 600 seats and taking control of 10 councils stretching from Kent to County Durham. The party also toppled a 14,000-strong Labour majority in a parliamentary by-election.
The Liberal Democrats’ local government spokesperson Zoe Franklin called the postponed elections “a disgrace”.
“Democracy delayed is democracy denied,” she added. “We are fighting to end this blatant stitch up between Labour and the Conservatives over local elections.”
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