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.
“Can I keep my mask on?” Shamima Begum asks before the interview starts. “I’m looking ugly today.”
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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.
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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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Tory incumbent Andy Street has suffered a shock defeat to Labour in the West Midlands mayoral election after a partial recount was ordered.
Labour’s Richard Parker beat Mr Street by just 1,508 votes – 0.25% – to deliver a major blow to Rishi Sunak in the key electoral battleground after a hammering in the local elections.
With the race neck-and-neck, in the end it came down to the results in one borough – Labour-supporting Sandwell.
“This is the most important thing I will ever do,” Mr Parker said in his acceptance speech.
“I promise you that I will deliver jobs,” he added.
He told Sky News he would take buses “back into public control” and deliver the “largest programme of social housing we’ve had in this region for more than 40 years”.
And he thanked his predecessor, who he said had “led this region through a number of great challenges and you deserve great credit for that”.
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Mr Street told Sky News he was “personally devastated”, had “put my all into this”, and “genuinely believed we were making real progress across the region”.
He said it was “my campaign, totally”, adding: “I’m not going to try to push responsibility anywhere else. There’ll be no sloping shoulders from me.”
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He wished his successor “all strength and wisdom”.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was a “phenomenal result” and “beyond our expectations”.
He added: “People across the country have had enough of Conservative chaos and decline and voted for change with Labour.
“My changed Labour Party is back in the service of working people, and stands ready to govern.”
Ellie Reeves, Labour’s deputy national campaign co-ordinator, said it was a “significant victory”.
She added: “Right across the country people have voted for change and the message is clear – it’s time for a general election and a Labour government to get our country’s future back.”
These results will increase pressure on the prime minister, who had been hoping for a repeat of the success enjoyed by Conservative Ben Houchen who held on as the mayor of Tees Valley.
Sam Coates, Sky News’s deputy political editor, said he had seen messages from Conservative MPs’ WhatsApp group.
One from former cabinet minister Simon Clarke, whom Coates said “wants Rishi Sunak to leave”, said: “These results are awful and should be a massive wake-up call.
“If we fight the same campaign in a few months [in the general election] we’ll get the same outcome or rather worse.
“Reform UK standing more candidates will cause greater damage.”
The loss of either the Teesside or West Midlands mayoralties would give Tory rebels who want to change leader a “huge amount of fuel”, former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said in the Electoral Dysfunction podcast.
Mr Street, who was seeking a third term in office, sought to distance himself from the Conservative brand during his campaign and instead ran on a personal platform.
Sky News recently revealed that Mr Street was sending out election literature with an endorsement from former prime minister Boris Johnson which urged people to “forget about the government”.
His campaign website also made no mention of Mr Sunak on its homepage and was coloured in green rather than Conservative blue.
It was the first time any candidate for London mayor has won a third term in office, with Mr Khan’s predecessors Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone both having served two terms.
As he took to the stage to make his victory speech, the re-elected mayor was booed and heckled with a shout of “Khan killed London” by the far-right Britain First candidate, who received fewer votes than Count Binface.
Speaking at City Hall, Mr Khan said: “We faced a campaign of non-stop negativity, but I couldn’t be more proud that we answered the fearmongering with facts, hate with hope, and attempts to divide with efforts to unite.
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“We ran a campaign that was in keeping with the spirit and values of this great city, a city that regards our diversity not as a weakness, but as an almighty strength – and one that rejects right hard-wing populism and looks forward, not back.”
He also thanked his family for their support, but apologised for them having to deal with “protests by our home” and “threats”.
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While congratulating Mr Khan on his victory, Ms Hall said he should stop “patronising” people who care about London.
When she had previously challenged him in a mayoral debate about “gangs running around with machetes” in the capital, he had said she should “stop watching The Wire” – a gritty US-based crime drama.
In her concession speech, she said: “The thing that matters the most, and to me, is reforming the Met and making London safe again. I hope Sadiq makes this his top priority.
“He owes it to the families of those thousands of people who have lost lives to knife crime under his mayoralty.
“And I hope too that he stops patronising people, like me, who care. This isn’t an episode of The Wire, this is real life on his watch.”
The pair had repeatedly clashed during the campaign, fought out amid concerns about knife crime and the handling of pro-Palestinian marches in the capital.
Just recently, Mr Khan had described his Conservative rival as the “most dangerous candidate I have fought against” over her past social media activity.
Hitting back, Ms Hall said she had “learnt” from her mistakes and branded his comment “outrageous”.
A clear dividing line between the candidates had been Mr Khan’s controversial expansion of the ultra low emission zone (ULEZ), which has been the subject of ongoing protests and which Ms Hall had pledged to scrap.
During the race, the Conservatives were forced to delete a clip used in an advert against Mr Khan’s record on crime after it emerged it used footage of a stampede at a New York subway station.
Meanwhile, Labour has made gains across the country, winning the Blackpool South by-election with a 26% swing from the Tories and taking control of councils in key battleground areas.
The party also picked up new mayoralties, including the critical regions of East Midlands and York and North Yorkshire, which includes Mr Sunak’s Richmond constituency.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “This is effectively the last stop on the journey to the general election and I am really pleased to be able to show we are making progress, we have earned the trust and confidence of voters and we are making progress towards that general election.”
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Mr Sunak has taken consolation in the Conservative victory in the Tees Valley mayoral race, which was retained by Lord Houchen and seems to be enough to calm rumblings among discontented Tory MPs.
However, the crunch contest for West Midlands mayor remains on a knife-edge.
Labour has also not had it all its own way, losing control of councils in Oldham and Kirklees after victories for independent candidates opposing the party’s stance on Gaza.
Labour also lost seats on other councils including Bristol, where the Greens extended its lead as the largest party and could now be set to run the city council despite narrowly failing to win outright control.
Notably, all 14 councillors in the newly created Bristol Central constituency are now Green, where the party is looking to unseat Labour’s shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire at the general election.
The Conservative Party has suffered its worst electoral defeat in years, losing more than half of its councillors who stood for re-election across England.
Labour hailed a “truly historic” result in Rishi Sunak’s own backyard of York and North Yorkshire, where David Skaith smashed Tory Keane Duncan by almost 15,000 votes.
The region, which was electing a mayor for the first time, covers Mr Sunak’s Richmond constituency and is an area Labour has historically struggled to compete in.
Speaking at Northallerton Town Football Club, Sir Keir Starmer said: “We’ve had a positive campaign here, and I am very, very proud to stand here as leader of the Labour Party to celebrate this historic victory.
“And it is a historic victory – these are places where we would not have usually had a Labour Party success but we’ve been able to create that success and persuade people to vote for us.”
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0:33
PM on ‘disappointing’ election results
Appearing alongside Lord Houchen at a victory rally, Rishi Sunak said: “I’ve got a message for the Labour Party too because they know that they have to win here in order to win a general election – they know that.
“They assumed that Tees Valley would stroll back to them – but it didn’t.”
This victory is likely to have quelled talk of rebellion among disenchanted Tory MPs who had threatened to oust the prime minister if the results proved a disaster, but it remains to be seen whether the Tories can hold on to the West Midlands mayoralty.
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3:25
Analysis: Local election results
Of the 107 councils that held elections on Thursday, 102 have declared their full results, with the Conservatives losing more than half of the seats it has been defending so far.
Some 468 Tory councillors lost their seats as the party lost control of 12 councils.
Sky’s election coverage plan – how to follow
The weekend: Sophy Ridge will host another special edition of the Politics Hub on Saturday from 7pm until 9pm. And Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips will take a look back over what’s happened from 8.30am until 10am.
How do I watch?: Freeview 233, Sky 501, Virgin 603, BT 313, YouTube and the Sky News website and app. You can also watch Sky News live here, and on YouTube.
The Electoral Dysfunction podcast with Beth Rigby, Jess Phillips and Ruth Davidsonis out now, and Politics at Jack and Sam’s will navigate the big question of where the results leave us ahead of a general election on Sunday.
However, Labour suffered setbacks in Oldham and Kirklees, where it lost control of the councils after victories for independent candidates opposing its stance on Gaza.
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Further results are expected over the weekend, including key mayoral contests in London and the West Midlands.
Labour’s Sadiq Khan is attempting to secure re-election in London, while Conservative Andy Street is defending his position in the West Midlands.
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Sky News general election projection
Rumours had swirled in London since the polls closed that Mr Khan could have suffered a shock defeat to Conservative Susan Hall, however Sky News understands both parties now believe the incumbent will remain in City Hall.
The results of those elections are expected to arrive at 10pm in London and 2.15pm in the West Midlands.
Other results still to be announced include council elections in the South and West of England where the Liberal Democrats and Greens hope to make progress.
There are also metro mayoral elections yet to declare a winner in Greater Manchester, Liverpool City, North Tyneside, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.