Former Isis-bride Shamima Begum has insisted she did not hate Britain when she travelled to Syria as a teen to join the terror group and repeated her plea for a chance to fight accusations against her in court.
The 22-year-old said she has “hopes and dreams” but has no plan B if the British citizenship of which she has been stripped is not reinstated.
Begum left her east London home for Syria as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in 2015.
Court of law
She has denied any involvement in terror activities and spoken previously of how she wanted to be brought back to the UK to face charges.
In an interview with Sky News, she repeated her denial of accusations that she carried out atrocities as part of IS (so-called Islamic State), saying they are “all completely false”.
She told the broadcaster: “I’m willing to fight them in a court of law but I’m not being given a chance.”
Of her decision to leave the UK as a teenager, she said it was not made quickly and that it was something she “thought about for a while”.
She said: “I didn’t hate Britain, I hated my life really.
“I felt very constricted, and I felt I couldn’t live the life that I wanted in the UK as a British woman.”
“More scary”
She remains in the al-Roj refugee camp in Syria, which she said has become “more scary” to live in.
She said: “For a long time it 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 said she would like to reconcile with her family “when the time is right”, explaining that: “I don’t think they failed me, in a way I failed them”.
Begum has previously told how she married Dutch convert Yago Riedijk 10 days after arriving in IS territory, and had three children all of whom died.
She said when she goes to sleep she thinks of “my children dying, the bombings, the constant running, my friends dying”.
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