Shamima Begum fears trial in Syria, claims facing death penalty
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Former jihadi bride Shamima Begum fears the prospect of being tried in Syria and sentenced to death over her support to the Islamic State Organization (ISIS).
However, despite her fears, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) abolished the death penalty, making the life imprisonment the maximum penalty for any crime.
In 2015, Begum fled Britain to join the terrorist organization in Syria with two of her school friends, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana.
Following her connections with ISIS, the British government stripped her of her citizenship in February 2021.
The 22-year-old girl, who is currently following a western lifestyle, now lives in Roj Camp in the countryside of Derik (al-Malikiyah), a city in Syria’s far northeast.
Begum claims that she does not want to be prosecuted under the AANES law, as she does not have faith in the justice system there.
“No, no, I don’t want that, that can’t happen. I don’t want to be tried in Syria,” Begum told the Mail on Sunday.
The woman claims to have been brainwashed when she joined the terrorist group, as she was just a child back then.
“I was an angel, you can ask my mum, I was an angel,” she said.
“When people are that age, they try to discover themselves in different ways and some people discover themselves through religion and that’s what happened to us – but then we went too deep into it,” she added.
Yet when she was captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) after liberating the town of Baghuz, the last ISIS enclave, she made an infamous interview in which she felt bad for being “weak” for fleeing the group’s last ground.
In the interview she said that a “severed head in a bin didn’t faze me at all” because it belonged to “an enemy of Islam.”
The AANES “authorities don’t advocate the death penalty but that has failed to convince her she won’t escape such a punishment,” a source told The Sun.
Nevertheless, she is still “facing a life jail sentence,” the source added.