Shamima Begum, now 26, appeared to have sunken eyes and seemed ‘very thin’ during her first appearance to a UK media outlet in more than two years. She had just six words for her interviewers
Shamima Begum has been pictured for the first time in years from her new home in exile, with the British-born ISIS bride appearing “pale and thin”.
The former Brit, who was born and raised in Bethnal Green, in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, entered Syria to join the terror organisation at the age of 15 in 2015, and was 10 days later a child bride to a Dutch Islamic convert. She was disavowed by the Conservative government and made stateless in 2019, and has since tried desperately to return to her family in the UK.
Now 26, she has appeared for the first time in years during a short interview at the al-Roj detention camp in Syria, where journalists noted that she appeared pale and thin despite her face being covered.
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Interviewers with the Express said she swept into the room where they were due to speak on camp grounds with her face covered by a surgical mask.
While this obscured most of her face, they said what they could make of her was that “her eyes were somewhat sunken, and she seemed pale, as well as very thin”.
The interview was her first appearance in years, with the stateless 26-year-old having last been seen in a controversial BBC documentary aired in 2023.
She wasn’t the only detention camp resident to walk into the interview room, having arrived alongside American Hoda Muthana, who fled to Syria to join ISIS in 2014, but surrendered to the new coalition in 2019. The two left almost as soon as they arrived, the Express reported, deciding not to answer questions beore swiftly exiting after Ms Begum declared: “We don’t have anything to say.”
Ms Begum is attempting to return to the UK, with her lawyers attempting to make a case to the European Court of Human Rights after all of her legal avenues were exhausted when the Supreme Court denied a final appeal attempt in August 2024.
Justices found the decision would be up to the court in their ruling, adding it would have to decide whether the process to deprive her of her British citizenship should have considered that she may have been a trafficking victim. Her lawyers claimed the UK had failed to intervene and achieve the return “of their citizens and their children” who have been “arbitrarily imprisoned”.
They said: “It is a matter of the gravest concern that British women and children have been arbitrarily imprisoned in a Syrian camp for five years, all detained indefinitely without any prospect of a trial. All other countries in the UK’s position have intervened and achieved the return of their citizens and their children.”