British ISIS Bride Shamima Begum ‘Bored’ of Brexit

Shamima Begum, the teenager who left the UK to join Islamic State and marry a jihadist, has said she is “bored” of Brexit, as her lawyer fights to have her repatriated.

Ms Begum, 19, made the comments in a ‘flash of humour’ during an interview with The Times, according to the newspaper’s journalist.

“Brexit: it goes on and on without end,” the jihadi bride said.

“It’s so boring now that I ask the sisters to flick on to the cartoon channel just to get away from it,” she added.

The Bethnal Green, east London, resident left the UK and travelled to Syria via Turkey when she was 15 with two other young fiancées of the caliphate, her friends Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana. She was only heard of again when she was found by a Times journalist at a refugee camp in Syria as the Islamic State fell, pregnant with her third child and after she had buried two others.

Following an extraordinary series of interviews where she described her hopes of her life under the Islamist regime, the Bangladeshi heritage jihadist was criticised for expressing no remorse for joining the terrorist group, which has killed, raped, and enslaved across Iraq and Syria.

British Home Secretary Sajid Javid made the decision to revoke Ms Begum’s British citizenship, resulting in her family launching a legal case to have her nationality reinstated and the Islamist returned to the UK.

Ms Begum appears to have changed her tone, telling the Times journalist, “Since I left Baghuz [a Syrian town formerly under the control of Islamic State] I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again.”

“I was brainwashed. I came here believing everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion,” she added.

As if to explain her earlier attitude, she told The Times, “When I first came out of al-Dawlah [Islamic State] I was still in the brainwashed mentality: I still supported them because of what they told me and what they taught me.”

A Kurdish administrator at the refugee camp said Begum has become “much more open now” and “has become more open minded, and is unlike the radical women here.”

Her family’s lawyer is appealing to British courts over the Home Office’s decision, with The Times suggesting a case could be made that as a 15-year-old, she was a minor when she chose to join the terror group and was a victim of grooming online by extremists, or that to revoke her citizenship may make her a stateless person.