RedHanded - Episode 210 - Shamima Begum: ISIS & The Bethnal Green 3 - Part 2

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

This week Suruthi and Hannah head into a place widely regarded as one of the most dangerous places in the Middle East right now - the notorious al-Hawl camp. It's where, in 2019, a British journalist found an 18-year-old, 9-month pregnant Shamima Begum. Soon after this discovery, Shamima Begum would have her British citizenship revoked, leaving her stateless in the desert hell-hole. In the concluding episode of this series, the girls discuss how ISIS used religion to justify sex slavery, the fall of the so-called caliphate and what should be done with individuals like Shamima Begum. Documentary recommendation: Sabaya  Donate to support Afghanistan: https://www.msf.org/ https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/afghanistanappeal https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ https://www.iwmf.org/2021/08/iwmf-calls-for-urgent-support-of-women-journalists-in-afghanistan/ https://support.womenforwomen.org/donate/afghanistan-emergency-2x-match?src=HHUA21082AFollow us on social media:InstagramTwitterFacebookVisit our website:WebsiteContact us:ContactSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti.

I'm Hannah and I just dropped my phone so I'm just going to put that back where it belongs. It immediately just went black as soon as I said I'm sweetie. I've immediately sabotaged the recording. And welcome to what continues to be a very homemade podcast of Red Handed. Yeah, bedroom DJs for life. Gold award or no gold award. We will forever be bedroom DJs.

Welcome, welcome back. Welcome back to part two of Shamima Begum, The Bethnal Green Three and Isis. Let's get straight back into where we left off last time. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, please stop what you're doing immediately. Cease and desist. Stop listening. stop and go back and listen to last week's episode because this will make absolutely no sense otherwise and it's already going to be tough to keep up with. So last week we left off with Shamima Begum being the only surviving Bethnal Green girl left in Syria. Amira Abbas and Khadija Sultana, along with their jihadist husbands, had been killed in airstrikes within a couple of years of arriving in Raqqa. And things, by all accounts, had not been going incredibly well for Shamima either.

She had had two children, both of whom had died, likely from malnutrition and treatable illnesses. And in 2019, Shamima was again nine months pregnant, holed up in ISIS's final enclave in the desert town of Baguz. Five years after it had been declared, the so-called caliphate had crumbled into nothing. Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had retaken all of ISIS territory, and the SDF were now there to take Baguz. As Shamima tried to flee, she was separated from her husband Yago, captured by the Kurdish forces and eventually taken to the notorious Al-Hol camp in northern Syria. But before we head into the camps, as we promised last week, we're going to talk about the Yazidi and the horrors that they have endured at the hands of ISIS.

Because even amongst the tales of unimaginable suffering that came pouring out of ISIS-controlled land, the story of the Yazidi still stands out. And if that word sounds familiar, it's either because you've been keeping up with the Middle East or because you've listened to our episode on Anton Levay and Satanism that we put out a few weeks ago. We talked about the Yazidi a little bit in that episode, but let's go over it again anyway. The Yazidi are a religious minority group from northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. For centuries, they have been persecuted, particularly by the Muslim majority of the area. And the reason for this, beyond the fact that they are just a religious minority and a polytheist religion, etc., it's likely because the story of Melech Taos, one of their seven key gods or angels,

sounds a lot like the Abrahamic story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. And this has led to the Yazidi being mislabeled as devil worshippers, even by the head of the Church of Satan, for decades. There's just so much misunderstanding around the Yazidi. And there was another suggestion I also found during the research for this episode as to why they may have been persecuted for as long as they have. Because like Hannah said, this has been going on for centuries. This is not something new that ISIS came up with.

Because there's also a suggestion that there has been a misunderstanding around the name Yazidi itself, especially in the Mount Sinjar region west of Mosul. Because in that region, back in the 7th century, there ruled a very, very unpopular man named Yazid ibn Miwayya. He was a drunk, an assadist, and widely despised. And some, particularly extremists like ISIS, wrongly believe that the Yazidi are somehow his supporters because his name was Yazid ibn Miwaya. Like, that's the only connection and the region that they're in. And the Yazidi are absolutely not this random 7th century sadistic rulers,

followers by any sense of anything. The word Yazidi, in fact, comes from the Persian word Izid, which means angel or deity. And the name Izidi actually means worshippers of God, which is how the Yazidi describe themselves, which is pretty ironic because they've been mislabeled worshippers of the devil when their name literally translates to worshippers of God. The literal opposite, yeah. Exactly. And Yazidiism takes elements from various different religions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. But interestingly, the majority of Yazidi tradition is actually oral. And also interestingly, I thought, one cannot convert into Yazidiism. So this secrecy, coupled with the fact that most of the Yazidi tend to live in separate communities,

often isolating themselves from others in that area for their own protection, has added to the suspicion that has been heaped upon them. As we discussed last week, some groups like al-Qaeda, while seeing Shia Muslims and other religious minorities as less than, feel like it's counterproductive to just indiscriminately kill them. But ISIS, not so much. For ISIS, murder and genocide is not just about taking power or even maintaining dominance. It's a holy act that brings them closer to their

ultimate goal of kick-starting their long-awaited apocalypse. ISIS also believe, as we discussed last week, in purifying, in inverted commas, Islam and the regions they rule by killing anyone that they deem to be apostate or a sinner, as we learned last week. So, for example, they look to the Shia and the Yazidi as examples of sinners that need to be eradicated. And so, for ISIS, murder, and, as we'll get onto later, rape, are cornerstones of their belief system, not just tactics of war or ways to incite terror. And the Yazidi in particular became a prime target.

It's hard for us to know how many Yazidi people have been slaughtered by ISIS, but estimates place the number at around 5,000. This is likely around 10% of the entire Yazidi population, destroyed in just a couple of years. And the lady that we talked about at the start of last week's episode, Nadia Murad, who, if you'll remember, was captured by ISIS and sold into sex slavery. Nadia somehow managed to escape. And since then leave a link to that entire interview in the episode description so that you can watch it. But honestly, brace yourself before you do, because it's honestly one of the most terrifying things you'll ever hear. It's so like dystopian. It's so apocalyptic what she describes happening. And I think for me, the hardest thing I found is when you listen to Nadia speak, I had to force myself to remember that what she was saying, what she was telling me had happened, happened just a few years ago, like literally a few years

ago. 2017, 2018, 2019, this was happening. And it's still happening today. It felt like reading about a horror story that had happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago somewhere. But no, this is so recent. And what's worse is that Nadia's story, when you listen to it, is so horrendous, but it's no outlier. What she and her community went through became nightmarishly commonplace as ISIS took more and more territory. Do you know what it always makes me think of? Obviously, this is a very woman-centred case. It always makes me think of that interview with Margaret Atwood when they talk about The Handmaid's Tale

and how she came up with all of the things that happened to the women. She's like, well, I made sure that everything in The Handmaid's Tale either had happened at some point in history or was happening now. So people couldn't accuse me of having an awful imagination. And that's the thing we often say being true crime podcasters is that there's rarely a case that I have read or a story that I have read that's been made up that has been worse than something I know to have happened. The people who are going to sit down and write a story like that don't have the minds that the people that are going to go out and commit a crime like that in real life. So we can't imagine worse than things that are already happening. And it's terrifying for many reasons, including that ISIS militants are armed to the teeth and they would surround Yazidi towns and

villages in the desert. And often, before they attacked, they would just wait, enjoying the terror of the Yazidi villagers trapped in their homes, knowing that there was no way out. Eventually, they would storm the settlement and separate the men, women and children. All the men and any male children with body hair, plus any women over the age of 45, would be marched out of the village, massacred and dumped in mass graves. The younger boys would

be tortured, taught to fight and added to the ISIS ranks. The remaining women and girls were then rounded up and loaded into trucks ready to be taken to a compound where they would be held until they could be sold as sex slaves. And this is another part of the ISIS ideology that we really need to understand. The use of rape and sexual slavery as a weapon of genocide is by no means unique to ISIS. We've seen this happen all over the world. But the difference with ISIS is that they justify the systemic rape and slavery by incorporating it into their theology. ISIS uses religious doctrine to claim that raping a kuffar or non-believer or someone of a different religion is not only allowed, but actually something that brings them

closer to God. Making rape not just a spoil of war or a weapon of control, but a key tenant of their ideology. It's exactly like we saw with murder. The murder isn't just like done to create terror or to win territory. They fundamentally believe by killing, by quote-unquote purifying Islam, by killing apostates and sinners, they are kick-starting the apocalypse. And the same thing with rape. By raping the kuffar, by raping women of other religions like the Yazidi, it is a holy act.

And just like we saw last week, ISIS don't leave anything to chance. Once they declared the caliphate, they also announced immediately that they would be reinstating slavery. So they quickly created all of the infrastructure needed to facilitate the human trafficking, like warehouses, compounds, safe trade routes and transportation. ISIS, bureaucratic and barbaric as ever, also created official slave contracts that were to even be notarized by their Sharia courts. And they even created handy little how-to manuals educating people on the do's and don'ts of owning slaves. And this is something I learned

listening to the now disgraced Caliphate. ISIS would give men a stipend if they had a subiah. So they would be given money to maintain the keeping of a slave. Like in Caliphate, there's a guy that they're interviewing and they can't work out where his money has come from. And she's like, okay, so you're a mechanic and you were earning this. And he's like, yes. And she's like, and he had two wives, which means you had this coming in from the state. And he was like, yes. And then she was like, so where is this extra money coming from? And then she figured out it's because he had a Sabaya. And Sabaya is the word that ISIS use for sex slave, specifically, typically when they're referring to Yazidi women. We'll go on to discuss that in a bit more detail in a moment. The interesting thing about

ISIS, you know, they literally had buses. They literally had buses specifically for moving sex slaves around. They were like organized down to the T with things like this. It's the state-sponsored sex program that incels want. That's what survivors are. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It's exactly that. This is why we talk about, sorry, quick plug again. We talk about that militant misogyny and actually how, despite various different ideologies linking things like ISIS or the incel culture or whatever it may be, the one thing that unifies all of them is militant misogyny, is this belief of women as being nothing and being able to dominate them and having unfettered access to women's bodies. It's not the only thing, of course,

but it's an interesting thing that unifies all of these disparate groups. And this organization that ISIS had was also, harking back to last week's episode, that ability that they had to take control because they came in and they were like, we're going to establish control. We're going to bring about security. We're going to put courts in place. Look how organized we are. We've set up almost overnight an entire fucking sex slavery ring that runs the entire length of the country. Like this is next level organizational capabilities that they had. And they didn't stop there because also, as we mentioned in last week's episode, ISIS have their own online magazine called Dabiq. Before I go in to talk about what's in Dabiq, all the horrifying things,

fun fact. I had been doing the research for these two episodes over the course of a few weeks, and I forgot what the ISIS magazine was called. So I was just googling ISIS magazine to try find it. Guess what? University of Oxford student magazine is called. It's called ISIS. And all it kept showing me was the University of Oxford's online magazine, ISIS magazine. I was like, no, that's not what I'm looking for. But I thought that was quite funny. Yeah, I don't know. I'd probably just have changed it. There are so many things that are called ISIS. Like in Archer, the secret spy agency they work for is called ISIS. Oh, but my favourite is, and I never watched this show. I hope I'm remembering it correctly. And if I've got it wrong, we'll just take this out. I believe that in Downton Abbey, there was a yellow lab called ISIS, who they killed off because of its name.

I have never watched an episode of Downton Abbey in my life, so I don't know. I haven't either. I just remember reading it somewhere. Maybe it's not true. Who knows? But anyway, coming back to ISIS's online magazine, Dabik, and this is one of the really interesting things that ISIS do because in Dabik, the year that they brought back slavery, ISIS began publishing lengthy articles discussing the religious justifications for rape. This, again, comes back to what we've been talking about during the entire course of this series. ISIS don't do things in secret.

They're not ashamed of what they're doing. They have sincerely held beliefs that what they are doing is correct, religiously, ethically, morally, in every sense of the word. hadith that they could use to bolster their arguments that sexual slavery was allowed and that rape was not only okay but a holy and spiritual act that will act and this is their words as a precursor to the end of the world which of course is their favorite thing ever and some of the survivors of isis's sex slavery actually spoke to the new york times for an article that i've read and they told them that the men who raped girls as young as nine years old would tell those girls that the rape was ibadah, which means worship. So essentially, these men would claim that rape is a form of prayer. I want to go home. Let that sink in. So the justification of rape was also handy for ISIS

because it helped them recruit in places like Iraq and Syria. We all know they are extremely conservative nations. Sex is largely a forbidden topic. So hooking up or sex outside marriage, really not socially acceptable at all. And so for some men, ISIS encouraging them to do whatever they wanted with these slave women. And the bonus on top of that, of it not being a sin, but actually a holy thing was hugely alluring. I don't know, maybe this is a good point to talk about a documentary that both Hannah and I watched over the weekend. So it literally just came out, and we're recording this on Monday, the 23rd of August. It came out two days ago and it's called Sabaya, which as we just said, is the word for sex slave,

typically when talking about a Yazidi woman. What did you think, Hannah? It wasn't what I was expecting. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I really found it so powerful when I watched it. The words I would use to describe it are relentless, bleak, infinite. Yes. Like, I think, you know, there's obviously many, many, many different ways of making a documentary film. If you need a story arc, this documentary is not for you. But it really hammered home for me, like just how many women there are. The basis is there's this one guy called Mahmood. That's his name, right? Yeah, that is him.

I love Mahmood so much with all of my heart. Oh, my God, what a man. What a man, what a man. Every time he'd come on screen towards the end, I just wanted to cry. Yeah, yeah. Just this very calm but very direct man. I love him. Before we talk about the grzzliness of this documentary,

the thing I would love to say about Mahmood is just like, he's always on his phone. He's always got his Nokia ringtone going off. Always smoking. Always smoking. Half the time when he answers the phone, the person on the other end can't hear what he's saying. It is just really repetitive in that way.

But there's like a weird underlining like comic relief to it because particularly the relationship between Mahmoud and his wife. Oh my God, I know. We're not sponsored by Sabaya, by the way, guys. We're just talking about it because it's such a good documentary to watch. I love that Mahmoud would be out literally every night rescuing Yazidi women who have been caught up in Al-Hol camp. Then he would come home and his wife would be like, so where have you been?

I haven't seen you in days. Everyone else's husband is home and you're never here. And then he's like, can I have a coffee, please? And she's like, get it yourself. I'm like, oh my gosh. And he's literally been out rescuing women and she's like, I've had enough of you. It very much is just like, well, what is it this time?

Do you know what it reminded me of? As like a perfect but pure and true representation of what too many times western documentaries tried to do when there's like a super cop story they're like he was so obsessed with the case he was never home and he was never doing this and that and it's like blah blah blah but i was like mamu just does it with like no grandioseness no airs about him he just like, this is just what I'm doing with my life now. And I loved it so much. And he's got this like cowboy walk. Like, you know, when men like don't straighten their arms properly. So they're like constantly at an angle and they're sort of like out from their body a bit. And then they just sort of like waddle around. That's exactly how he walks. There's a bit when it's not just his wife,

like someone else like challenge. He goes in the documentary, he goes to one of the prisons. We'll get onto this in a minute. But like women and children are held in camps. The majority of men are in prison. So they're kept separately. When they opened the little window to the door in that prison, I gasped when you saw how many ISIS prisoners were in one room. I was like, oh, my God. And that's prisoners that used to be ISIS, not prisoners being held by ISIS.

To clear that up. So he goes and interviews this man. Because all Mahmood is doing is trying to find these Yazidi girls, right? So he's interviewing these prisoners being like, where are they? And then he goes home and one of his mates comes and has dinner with him. And he's like, you're taking too many risks, Mahmood. You're pushing it too far. Mahmood just goes, just walks off.

He's like not having it. Just gets up and walks off. I love him. I loved the documentary. I thought it was so incredibly powerful. I would definitely recommend it. Again, we are not sponsored by Savaya, but it's on Amazon Prime. You can watch it straight through Dogworth like Hannah and I did. And essentially the story of it is following this man, Mahmood, and the people who work with him as volunteers. They are not in any official capacity. He's not a police officer. He's not any official person. He's just a dude who is a Yazidi man, and he knows that ISIS obviously abducted thousands of Yazidi women and girls,

sold them as sex slaves. And then when the Kurdish forces stormed these different towns and villages held by ISIS, they took all of the women because they didn't know who's Yazidi, who's not like, they don't know. Everybody's wearing fucking niqab. They just take them all and put them in these camps to hold them. So there are just a bunch of Yazidi women and girls who were fucking kidnapped from their homes, now stuck in al-Hol camp and camps like it. And Mahmoud and his volunteers basically go in and rescue them from them and take them back to their families. And it's incredibly heartwarming. What it really opened my eyes to that I hadn't thought about is that all of the women are wearing makeup. So it's fucking impossible to recognize anybody. So like when you go into the

camp, they're literally looking at the women's eyes and comparing them to photographs they have on a phone. And that's all they can do. Or they have to send in a woman to the tent and get the women to show her their faces. And often these women were taken years and can do. Or they have to send in a woman to the tent and get the women to show her their faces. And often these women were taken years and years ago, so they look completely different. It's really worth your time. Go watch it. We'll leave a link below to where you can check it out. A very well-made documentary that showed, I thought, in a real way, the chaos and the terror and the fear in these camps. More so than the documentary we talked about last week. So yeah, check it out.

That's very true. The return is very good, but it's produced in a very Western way. Very sanitised. Yes, yes, absolutely. So let's pick up back with Shamima Begum in Al Hall Camp, which is where Mahmood and his team are saving Yazidi girls day in, day out. And this camp is widely regarded to be one of the most dangerous places in the entirety of the Middle East at the moment. Al-Hol and camps like it are often referred to as refugee camps,

but that's not what they are at all. Al-Hol is a detention camp, a concentration camp. What people forget is that concentration camps started out as like in Cuba and in South Africa as places you would keep people who were on your side, people who you were trying to save, keep separate from the fighting. So it's a concentration camp in kind of the original sense, I suppose. And the people who are being held there have not actually been convicted of any crime. They haven't had trials and they're completely invisible. A lot of them, as we'll go on to discuss, are stateless. And it's not hyperbolic to say that known terrorists

in Guantanamo Bay have more rights than the children currently trapped in our hall. And there are a lot of them. And quite frankly, surviving infancy in that camp is a miracle. When the camp was first created in early 2019, the population was roughly 10,000. That's 10,000 people living in tents. At last count, the UN estimated that there are now probably, likely around 62,000 people existing in Al-Hol. 22,000 of those people are children. And those astronomic numbers that seem difficult to quantify in any real sense include at least 7,000 Yazidi women and girls who were trafficked by ISIS. And this is the thing.

I feel like we'll go on to talk about our feelings about the people in Al-Hol and Al-Raj and these other camps and what we should do with them morally and ethically, what is the right thing to do. And people may have different opinions on that. But I think that the idea, if you watch this documentary, if you see the pictures of these camps, the idea that 22,000 children live there, I defy anybody to say that that is not heartbreaking and absolutely horrific. Because this place and places like it, these camps, they're an absolute hellhole. It's like a literal open-air concentration camp in the middle of the desert with almost no access to healthcare, education, shelter, food, water, anything. The lack of sanitation. If anyone has ever been in the desert, you know that in the sun, in the summer, these places swelter, obviously, under the Syrian sun. And of course, in the winter, temperatures absolutely plummet beyond comprehension.

And so this has, of course, led to the UN declaring Al-Hol camp conditions to be deplorable and inhumane. And now the little resources that there were there originally, managed by the exhausted Kurdish forces and the charities who were working on the ground, are stretched beyond belief as the camp is bursting at the seams from overcrowding. Things have gone from bad to worse and naturally violence has become a daily issue. And this is where I think we need to really, really start thinking with our, like, grey area hats on. None of this, none of this story is black and white. It is so grey.

Because 80% of the camp's population is made up of women and children. But in most cases, according to journalists and guards, it is the women themselves who are maintaining the oppressive ideologies of ISIS. And that's the thing that really is quite striking about Sabaya. Again, something I hadn't even thought about. Like these Yazidi women who are being hidden in the camps because that's what they're doing they're being hidden they're not being given up they are being hidden by women there's no fucking men there the men are in prison so it's the women that are hiding other women you know it really proves the point of this like you know because obviously we talked about last week, the like fucking like haram police were all women. Hizb ut-Yah.

Yes. Well done, yeah. And I was very, and Mahmood, like the way he speaks to these women who are hiding these Yazidi girls, he's like, you're not going anywhere until you start telling the truth. And he's so calm. He's not shouting. He's just like, no, well, that's not true, is it? It's not true, is it? And this is the thing that is so important to understand,

that of course there are women there who are perhaps purely victims. Yeah, like the Yazidi, but maybe there are non-Yazidi women there who are also purely victims. But a lot of these women are the ones now running the show inside the camps and they're not doing a very nice job of it, to put it very fucking mildly. Because absolutely, yeah, the men are not in these camps anymore. It's just the women. And these women of ISIS have set about recreating the strict rules of the caliphate in their new home. So yes, absolutely. While women

were, of course, oppressed by ISIS in ISIS-controlled territory, when the men were gone, they still continue to do it to each other. And yes, you could say, oh, they've been brainwashed, sure. But like, how far does that argument really stretch? Like, you know, we'll get onto that in a bit. But yeah, just know that it's the women controlling the situation in the camps. And the guards, who are typically from the Kurdish-led forces, try their best to control the situation. But honestly, when you've got 62,000 people in this like sprawling network of tents in this ginormous camp, it's completely beyond them. They can't effectively manage that many people with so few resources and such little help. Guns, phones, money, it's all constantly flowing into the camp. And these ISIS women,

who have successfully taken charge of the camps, even managed to attack and kill guards on a semi-regular basis. They also have zero problems killing other women, and even children, that they deem to be turning their backs on ISIS and the caliphate. In her article in The Guardian this year, Middle East correspondent Bethan McKernan wrote about the case of an Azerbaijani woman who smothered her own 14-year-old granddaughter to death for refusing to wear the niqab. That just shows you how deep the programming goes. And sadly, this kind of nightmarish incident is all too common these days in Al-Hawl. According to some grim statistics that we came across, Al Hall is apparently averaging at least 20 murders a month.

Imagine in a town made up of 62,000 people, 20 people were murdered every month. And as shocking as 20 murders a month may be, I think we can pretty safely say that it is an underestimation. How can you possibly be quantifying that when you don't even know how many people are really in there? And they don't know how many people are really in there because the guards have literally no system of tracking the residents. There's no database of who is in there and they're not counted on a daily basis. And numerous reports claim that people are often just killed and buried

in shallow graves within the camps. So that's deaths that nobody is recording. And in 2019, when Anthony Lloyd, the Times foreign correspondent, went to Al Hall, he found in and amongst this fucking hellholishness. Remember that in 2019, it wasn't even as bad as it is now because it literally just opened. Anthony Lloyd found a shell-shocked looking 18-year-old, nine-month pregnant Shamima Begum. Shell-shocked-looking is the word. Like, if you look at her eyes in that interview, it's just dead space. Like, there is nothing going on there.

Like, it's really quite scary. Absolutely. And it's also the same look I've seen on... Shvera told you about that BBC documentary about that Welsh BBC reporter who went to Syria and, like, interviewed someone just because she'd been to school with him or something and there was no real reason for her to be doing it and he was really weird. So basically a male like absconded from North Wales, ended up in Syria. She goes to Syria to interview him because they went to school together and the look on his face is exactly the same as Sh Shamima. It's just this like trauma, stillness almost.

Like, do you know what I mean? That's it because it's so hard to explain, especially obviously we're not a documentary. We're not a visual format. We can't just show you a picture of her, but go and look at this interview. Go watch this interview that Anthony Lloyd does with Shamima Begum.

And it's so striking, not just the dead look in her eyes, which is very, very there, also the fact that she looks so young. She's only 18 at this point, and she is nine months pregnant, sat in this fucking camp. It is just some of the...

This whole thing is... Honestly, we've covered some real scary, scary fucking shit from around the world. This stuff scares me like almost nothing else. It's horrific. And also, she's already had two babies that are dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two of her kids are dead already by this point.

One died as a baby, one died at two. You can learn about this in the Return documentary. When Shamima gets there, she's married off pretty instantly. And her husband is Dutch. He's not Syrian. He's not Iraqi. He's Dutch. A Dutch defector.

Yep, yep, yep. So during this interview, Shamima Begum told Anthony Lloyd, in no uncertain terms, that she had absolutely no regrets about leaving London to come to Syria to join ISIS. And she also says that she thought what ISIS had done was justified because of all of the Muslim lives that the West had destroyed. When questioned about the murder of journalists, because Anthony Lloyd, the Times foreign correspondent who's interviewing her, knew people like James Foley, so they were his friends. So he's asking her, what do you think about journalists being beheaded?

And to this, Shamima just says that they shouldn't have been there anyway. She's so, like, flippant about everything. She's so like dismissive of everything, all of the stuff that Anthony Lloyd asks her. And she even casually talks to him in this interview about seeing piles of severed heads in bins. And when he asks her about this, she just shrugs it off as if it's nothing, saying that she didn't feel sad when she saw that or scared or traumatized. She said when she saw those heads piled up, all she thought was, I wonder what those people had done to deserve that. She's radicalized. Of course she is. And she's incredibly traumatized. We're not excusing Shamima Begum. She's going to make up the bulk of this episode.

But there's no denying those two things. Absolutely. And like, equally, we can't sort of skip over the stuff that she's saying, but we also can't deny that probably the most common trauma response is disassociation. And disassociated people look very unbothered, but they are very, very bothered. But interestingly, during this interview, she did also say that she wanted to return to the UK to raise her third child, the one that she's currently pregnant with.

And as you can imagine, I was actually discussing this with people at the weekend, which we'll talk about in the under the duvet. That went down like a cup of cold sick back here in jolly old England. And Shamima Begum propelled herself from, you know, tragic missing girl to the status of national hatred, like public enemy number one, which for an 18 year old girl is

pretty prolific status to be in. That's really, really, really how it was. I remember it very clearly. Actually, it wasn't until relatively recently I found out how young she was. I had assumed, because of the way it was being reported, that she had left when she was 18 and now she was in her 20s. And that is not true. Some places misreport that she's in her 20s when this Anthony Lloyd interview was done. She's not. She leaves in 2016. This interview's in 2019.

She's 15 when she leaves. She's 18 when this interview happens. And in the time in between when Shamima and the Bethnal Green Girls had disappeared, and this interview in February 2019, as Saru just said, public sentiment in the UK

had changed drastically. During those few years, we had constant news reports of bombings, what ISIS did to the Yazidi, and of course, we in Europe endured countless more terror attacks on home soil, like the Bataclan London Bridge and the Manchester Arena bombing, to name just a couple. In fact, those years were some of the bloodiest years when it came to Islamist terrorism in Europe. So now, any benefit of the doubt that Shamima had been afforded when she'd first run off had vanished. And it also really didn't help

Shamima Begum's case that in the same interview, she sounds and looks so casual, completely calm and cold, totally disconnected. And this interview really was the final nail in the coffin, devastating for Shamima across the board. In the UK, people were now going to firing ranges to shoot at pictures of her. And in our hall, the hardcore ISIS brides running around with knives and guns branded Shamima as a traitor,

presumably for even speaking to a journalist, let alone what she said. Yeah, absolutely. Shamima Begum, this interview is like a real, real fucking bad, bad move for her because, yeah, like you said, in the UK, people are watching this girl being like, I had no regrets, but I still want to come back to the UK.

People literally firing ranges, apparently, in places like Kent, had an 18-year-old girl's picture up for people to shoot at. It's that level of like toxicity that came with her case here in the UK. But in El Hull, things became dangerous for her in a very real sense because she said she wanted to go back to the UK. She said the right thing in terms of I have no regrets and ISIS did the right thing.

But her saying she wanted to go back to the UK meant she was a traitor and these women who were running the show there fucking heard it and they saw it and they were coming for her and if you watch the documentary The Return Life After ISIS you'll see many of the women on camera stating that they will wait there in the camp where children are dying left right and center well children and women then they'll just wait right there for the return of the caliphate, that they're not giving up. And just like Shamima said in her interview, they had no regrets. I think when you watch this, you know that some of the women saying it truly believe this, truly believe that they're happy to wait in Al-Hol for the return of ISIS and return of the caliphate. But there is no doubt that some of the women saying it are only doing so out of fear for their lives.

Because we can't stress this enough. In the Al-Hol camp, according to Anthony Lloyd, it is split into roughly three groups. Group one are those who don't care about ISIS or the caliphate and they just want out. They just want to get the fuck out of there and go home. Group two, hardcore ISIS lovers. And group three, and this was something that really fucking shocked me when I read about this, are those who are more radical than ISIS.

So yeah, if you are in group one and you're fucking done with the caliphate, you're done with ISIS, you want out, somehow you've managed to maybe de-radicalize yourself. If the other two groups find out that that's how you're thinking, they're going to fucking kill you. And this is not hyperbolic. They will do it. These women, if they can get their hands on guns, they're using guns to murder people and bury them in shallow graves, like Hannah said. Other things they're doing is charities give these women like kitchen kits, right, with knives so they can cook so they can have some semblance of normalcy in these tents they're using those knives to stab guards and other people to death in the camps there is like

nowhere you could feel safe and when we look at group one group two group three we could only speculate as to where shamima begum sits like which group does she belong to i don't know is she really loving isis and she just wants to come home for the sake of this kid? Or does she actually not care about ISIS and the caliphate and she's only, that she was in shock. And whatever you think of her, whatever you think of Shamima Begum, consider living in a war zone, losing two children, fleeing from essentially a military takeover, losing your husband, being 18, all alone, and nine months pregnant in a dangerous desert detention center. I just don't believe that all of that wouldn't deeply traumatize you. One of the things we say all the time on the show is that there's no such thing as monsters. They're just people. They're traumatized in different ways

and Shamima Begum is definitely traumatized. And before people totally fucking lose it, I know that she went there on purpose. And I'm not asking you to even sympathize with her necessarily. But we do have to logically acknowledge the impact that those things would have on a person's psyche and behavior. You can't ignore that. No, absolutely not. And I think that it's this emotional thing, right? Like it's all of the same arguments as like, we know that restorative justice lowers crime rates, but we don't like it because it doesn't feel emotionally equitable. We

want people to suffer if we feel like they've done wrong. That's a human response. With something like Shamima Begum, especially in, you know, the climate when she left for sure, and especially the climate now, there is no bigger enemy on the world stage than ISIS. We hear about it all the time. So for her to have rejected the UK and moved to there is kind of the worst thing she could have done in the public eyes. So that's why people have this savage reaction to it. You know, it's all fed into all of the propaganda we hear

about the Middle East and 9-11, blah, blah, blah, Afghanistan. Like, it's all fed into the same the propaganda we hear about the Middle East and 9-11, blah, blah, blah, blah, Afghanistan. Like it's all fed into the same rhetoric that we're told time and time and time again. And what gets lost in there for me is that she was groomed and she was a child. Yeah. And we'll come on to talk about that in more detail. But I also do understand people's visceral reaction to this kind of thing, because not only does somebody who leaves the UK and go to Syria to join ISIS, they're not just doing something that most of us may disagree with. It's an outright rejection of what, you know, what British values mean, this, that and the other. It could be a personal thing. For me, you know, the freedoms I'm afforded in this country, democracy, freedom for women, these kind

of things, freedom of speech, they are things that to me are important values. And somebody who leaves the UK to go to Syria to join ISIS is turning their back on those things and saying that they're not important and going to join a group that thinks the total opposite of everything, join a fucking death cult. So I do understand people's visceral reaction, but I think it was so toxic that we lost all sight of any kind of healthy conversation around what should be done because it became so polarised, shockingly. I also, you know, I don't agree with everything our government says, not by a fucking, I was going to say a country mile. Who am I? I don't know. You know, one thing that the UK Parliament did say was, for those who back terror, there should be consequences. And that is not

something that I can disagree with. Yes, absolutely. Rehabilitation, de-radicalisation, it's the right thing to do. We'll go on to talk about this, not just ethically, but also for safety, for security reasons. But I also can't help but feel like, yeah, you chose this. But at the same time, I also can't say that she hasn't suffered quite a lot since she's been out there. Anyway, let's save our opinions about Shamima till the end, I reckon. Not that we're not probably already giving it quite a lot away. Yeah. Do you know, the one thing people do say about this show is that we do keep our opinions to ourselves and we're really good at it. Aha. I certainly am not going to talk in circles about Shamima Begum

for the entirety of this episode. There's no politics here. Let's get back to Shamima because it's not over. Things are going to get worse. A couple of days after that now infamous interview, she gave birth to her third child, a boy that she named Jara, which was actually the name of her first child who died. And within a week, Sajid Javid, our then Home Secretary, now Health Secretary and a piece of

human garbage, served notice to strip Shamima of her UK citizenship. She had no idea that this had happened and only found out when a journalist told her. As Shamima was filmed reading the letter explaining the decision, again, she's calm and detached and just said that she wasn't that surprised. But maybe some of you lot are, because under international law, leaving someone stateless is illegal and it's a human rights violation. But this is the Tories we're talking about. And while some are covering for Sajid Javid and his crew, saying that, well, maybe they've seen some top secret information about terrorist activity that Shamima Begum was involved in out in Syria, and that's why he'd been able to do it, which is,

you know, the perfect argument, isn't it? Like, oh, well, I've got secret information that you plebs don't have, so I can do what I want. And like, I just feel like if they did, they would have just shown us because it would have taken the fucking wind out of all of the people saying that this is a terrible thing to have done. Well, apparently not. Sajid Javid can just revoke a person's citizenship for no better reason than he believes that that's what the public want. And then, of course, the outcry over Shamima Begum's 2019 interview

gave him the perfect opportunity. Yeah, I mean, when people are going to firing ranges to shoot at pictures of her, it's very easy to say, this is what the public wants, so I'm going to do it. Like, we handed it to him. So when questioned about leaving Shamima Begum stateless, Sajid Javid said that since her parents were Bangladeshi, that she should just go to Bangladesh and apply for citizenship there, despite the fact that Shamima Begum was born in the UK, raised in the UK, and claims to never even have been to Bangladesh before. And I can understand it from like a Bangladeshi point of view, be like, well,

she was radicalized in the UK. She's your fucking problem, mate. Of course, like what the fuck? Like, yeah, I'm going to hold back on that for a moment it's a whole conversation but before people think that we're too much on Shamima Begum's side I'm gonna say at least for me I'm not really for the longest time and I'll be honest about this I couldn't really have cared less about bringing Shamima Begum home we like all of you watch the attacks have unfolded over the last few years in Europe, in the UK, in horror. And my heart was honestly just with the Yazidi people. I would have argued, and I did argue probably, that we should bring a bunch of poor Yazidi women and girls here to this country instead of the likes of Shamima Begum, someone who chose to go out there and join ISIS.

But firstly, I also understand now that it's not a zero-sum game. It's not like we can just take Yazidi people or we can take back our fucking citizens who went out there and acted like pricks. I also think that that argument was not fair of me to say that I didn't care about bringing people like Shamima Begum home. Because there are fundamental issues here with them revoking her citizenship, etc. and leaving her stateless with how the government have handled this case. I mean, I just think we have to be honest and say, can we really allow our government to just arbitrarily decide when they want to ignore human rights issues just because we don't like the person involved? And I think this is the thing I will always come back to is like, for tyranny to win, we have to just be like, okay, with people that we don't like being abused, or being, you know, stamped on by the government. And that's the thing I think we have to challenge

our opinions on. And that's what I've had to do with this case. My knee jerk reaction was fuck all of them. But then why should the government be allowed to arbitrarily abuse human rights violations just because I don't like that person? They can't. We have to stand up for everybody or you stand up for nobody. That's the point. And the reason that they shouldn't have just done this, they shouldn't have treated Shamima Begum this way. And this isn't some, you know, I'm crying for Shamima Begum. What I'm saying is that she's never been convicted of terrorism. Now, I do understand that proving what somebody did in a foreign country, especially in a war zone like Syria, is not easy. There are

literally no fucking records. There's no way that we could know. There's never going to be enough evidence. And I'm absolutely not naive enough to think that Shamima Begum could be brought back to the UK. She could stand trial here and that her case would in any way meet the necessary threshold for a criminal conviction. That's just not going to happen. 99% likelihood that's not going to happen. So most likely, if Shamima Begum was brought back to the UK, she would end up back in the community. But I am also not naive enough to think that Shamima Begum and people like her pose no threat. And those are all valid points. But we're going to push it a little bit further.

So I find it hard to believe that our government have no problem going forward and making someone stateless, which is against international law. So they're big enough to do that. But they couldn't bring someone back and rigorously track and monitor them, even if they weren't a convicted terrorist. I feel like the argument is like, oh, well, we couldn't just bring her back here and track her and monitor and keep her locked up because that would be an abuse of human rights. I'm like, you just fucking made her stateless. Like, if you're happy to do that, then bring her back here and I don't know, keep her locked up, keep her locked up in a fucking apartment where you watch her all day. Like, I don't know. But like, don't say that you wouldn't do that because that's an abuse of human rights and you would never cross that line you've already made

her stateless which is against international laws like it's just picking and choosing what lines they're willing to cross anti-terrorism laws in the uk are in a league of their own the government and the police can cross literally any line. They can push literally any limit if there is a suspicion of terrorism. Even if the person has never been convicted of anything, let alone terrorism. So I think they could handle Shamima Begum. Yeah. I mean, what does it say about our government that they claim they couldn't just bring these few people back and handle them? Yeah, it seems difficult to believe that our government couldn't handle managing Shamima as a suspect. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal.

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It's tangent time, you lucky, lucky people. I know how much you love them. We won't take them away from you. So we've seen a lot of people commenting on this case saying that Shamima Begum's citizenship being revoked was a racist decision. And that if she had been white, this never would have happened. But soz guys, I really don't think that argument fits here and we're going to back it up because our government have stripped multiple people of all ethnicities of their citizenships the most famous being aside from shmima was probably jack letts you probably know him as jihadi jack he ran off to syria in 2014

jack letts is a very middle class white boy from Oxford. His parents run like an organic farm or some shit in Shropshire, which is about as English as it fucking gets. And in fact, the government went after his extremely English parents as well, because they sent him money while in Syria. So they were both found guilty of funding terrorism and they received suspended jail sentences. Jihadi Jack had his UK citizenship revoked entirely and was left stateless. So I don't think we can use the race argument this time.

No, no, no. Our government equal opportunities offender against human rights violations. I just don't think race really came into it. I think Shamima Begum's case got so much coverage because she was so young. I think that was the reason. And maybe you think about the fact

that Jihadi Jack's citizenship was revoked and that Shamima Begum's citizenship was revoked. Like, maybe you think, good, who cares? Maybe you're like, why the fuck do we need to bring them back to this country? Why are you arguing that point? That's because the problem is when you leave someone stateless, especially a possibly dangerous someone, unless you think that we should just like round up all these people we've decided to make stateless and I don't know, like shoot them to death, they are going to

continue to live, continue to exist somewhere. And someone is going to have to deal with that person. And the question becomes, why on earth should Bangladesh have to deal with Shamima Begum? She was, as Hannah said, radicalized here in the UK, most likely with the help of her British classmate, who left for Syria three months before she did, by a British woman we met last week, Ashk Mahmood, aka the mother of the lion. So why should Bangladesh, who already are dealing with the rise of radical Islam, have to take her? And as for Jihadi Jack, the UK

government told him, after they made him stateless, to try and get citizenship in Canada because his dad is like Canadian or half Canadian or something. Why the fuck should Canada have to deal with Jack Letts when he was radicalised in his bedroom in Oxford? And if neither Canada or Bangladesh take people like Jihadi Jack or Shamima Begum, please tell me, why should the Kurds have to keep them? I mean, that is the real question. Why should the Kurds have to deal with them? They've already fucking defeated ISIS. Give them a break. Exactly. This makes no sense. So

unless you are advocating for rounding these people up and exterminating them, you making them stateless makes them somebody else's problem. And they should be our problem. Because they are. We created them. And I think the arrogance of our government to just shrug these people off and to shirk our responsibility, however unsavoury these people are, is pretty disgusting, to be honest. And when we force other nations to have to pick up the pieces like this, we become an exporter of terrorism. And our government has a duty to take responsibility for its citizens. Anything else, to me, just doesn't feel fair or right.

And before people lose their minds, hold up, because let's talk facts. Because maybe you're like, what you're saying is fair enough, but we can't just take thousands and thousands of people back into the UK after they've been living in camps in Syria and been with ISIS for all these years. Firstly, let's clarify something. Other European countries have taken their citizens back from these camps. Granted, not all European countries have taken all of them. In fact, no European countries have taken all of their citizens. But guess who has? The US. The US has taken every single one of their citizens that was in a camp in Syria back to the US. Literally the last one I would have said. And I do think it's interesting. Obviously, we are in the midst of a refugee crisis at the moment. And people feel very strongly about whether we should have refugees in this country and blah, blah, blah, and the NHS and blah, blah, blah, etc. This isn't what this is. These people were already there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not going to be an overinflation. It's not going to be an overpopulation. It's not going to be people stuffed into high-rise buildings. They were already there. And also, that's the point of the argument, isn't it? Like,

we can have healthy debates around immigration, right? I don't want every conversation around immigration to accuse the person who is saying, maybe we don't take loads of immigrants. We can't just immediately call them racist. There are arguments to be had around immigration. But this isn't immigration. These people are British citizens and we have to take them back because they were radicalized in this country and they are British citizens. Choosing to ignore that is a human rights violation. And this is what I'm saying, is that the government will turn on these people. And if we don't stand up to this kind of tyranny, because that's what it is, who are they going to turn on next is the question. And that's the point that I'm trying to make.

And the other thing that the UK government loves to fucking do when having this conversation about bringing British citizens back from Syria, they love to throw around numbers, like there being 400 British detainees in these camps. And they say, we can't possibly bring back 400 of them. How would we track them? Where would we keep them? They're so dangerous. But this 400 number is just not true. We're talking about, and this is according to The Times,

on official last count, there are nine British men, 15 British women, and 20 to 30 British children at most left in these camps in Syria. And we're like, we don't want them. You could put them all in one fucking building. That's obviously not the only argument, this sort of overpopulation refugee argument.

Some people, of course, argue that Shamima Begum is a threat to national security, and that's why she shouldn't come back. And like we said, we don't necessarily disagree with this. It would be incredibly naive of us to do that. But there are two points that we'd like to make. According to the data, returning extremists have some of the lowest rates of recidivism among any offender type. Studies have shown that less than 10% re-offend. And also, leaving these men, women and children locked up in these camps and prisons will only create a prime breeding ground for ISIS 2.0. Let's pick these points apart a bit. We understand that although rates of re-offending are low among this group, the consequences of a successful terror attack are a lot more deadly than they might be in other offender groups and a lot more devastating than other types of offences. But by keeping these

camps as they are, we're putting so much undue pressure on the Kurdish forces who have already said that they don't have the resources or the ability to manage the situation on the ground. We've abandoned the Kurds and left them to deal with our citizens. And we owe the Kurdish fighters more than anyone. They defeated ISIS and once the job was done, the Western forces just bailed. They literally left under the cover of darkness. Once these territories were taken back, US, UK, NATO forces, they literally left under the cover of darkness so that Kurdish forces wouldn't see them leaving. We did them

dirty, like so dirty. And there's no denying that the Kurds have been the biggest victims of ISIS, except for the Yazidi. And now the Kurdish forces are not only trying to deal with Edoan in Turkey, trying to destroy them, but also Assad. On top of which, they're trying to handle these sprawling, overpopulated camps full of people like Shamima Begum and other Europeans like her that were radicalized here in Europe. And we've just dumped them on the Kurds, who've got enough to fucking deal with, quite frankly.

Oh, absolutely. And even if you can square all of that in your mind and be okay with it, the lack of resources in running these camps means that there are countless escapes on a daily basis. And those getting out, if they find their way back to Turkey, can just come straight back into Europe. So the problem will end up back at our front door anyway. And if these people say they're from groups two or three that we mentioned earlier, so ISIS lovers slash more radical than ISIS, and they get back into the UK or other European countries, we won't have a clue who they are, where they are,

or what the hell they're doing because we didn't track them because we don't know they're in the country because they escaped and made their way back here how is that a good solution and these people particularly women who are being smuggled out and we're talking about the women who are you know still isis supporters etc they're being smuggled out more and more regularly thanks to a rise in ISIS camp bride marriages. And this is a fun little world that I got to explore this week. Apparently, the women stuck in these camps, because remember, phones and stuff are being smuggled in.

They're on social media, many of them, especially the ones who are a bit more in charge and a bit more powerful. They're using social media to attract the attention of foreign ISIS supporters. And these men send these women money and they even marry them over the phone. Apparently to marry one of these ISIS women who is like in this camp, stuck there, hopeless, etc. gives these foreign ISIS male supporters in other countries, apparently gives them a huge level of ISIS street cred. Because, you know, they're supporting a sister who's in the camps, they're like defending ISIS, they're doing their work for the return of the caliphate.

And for these women, it is, of course, a route to escape. But whatever we or you might think, Sajid Javid stuck to his guns and after the threats against her within the camp ramped up following the infamous interview, in March 2019 Shamima Begum was moved from Al Hall to the much calmer Al Raj camp nearer the Iraqi border. But just days later, Shamima Begum's third child, a three-week-old baby called Shara, died of breathing difficulties and pneumonia. You can bet your bottom fucking dollar that's because of camp conditions. There was nothing wrong with them. It's just impossible. It's just impossible to live in that environment. And little Shara was buried in a tiny unmarked grave just outside the camp.

It's just the bleakness of it. This child born into a hellhole in a like war-torn destroyed country in a desert detention camp survives just three weeks and then dies of something purely because of how bad the conditions are that could have possibly been treated if he'd have had access to healthcare. And then he's just buried in the desert outside of this camp. I mean, is there anything more bleak than that? It makes me, like, sick. In February 2020, Shamima tried again to appeal against the Home Office's decision to revoke her UK citizenship.

But she failed. Shamima now says that she's sorry and that she regrets her actions. She also says that she wants forgiveness from the UK. She explained in more recent interviews that towards the end of her time with ISIS, she'd started to become disillusioned with the group. She felt that there was so much oppression and corruption among ISIS leadership that she felt they didn't deserve to win any longer, which is obviously easy to say once the caliphate has fallen. Oh, absolutely. And it's also interesting to say that this corruption and oppression

that she talks about only seems to have become an issue for Shamima in the weeks leading up to the fall of Baguz, when, like you said, the caliphate is very much crumbling, but also the time when ISIS leaders took her husband Yago away under suspicion of being a spy. They apparently tortured him for days before returning him. And after this is when Shamima says that she lost faith in ISIS. So it's very interesting that she only started to feel like ISIS were too corrupt and oppressive when it personally affected her, not when, you know,

they were oppressing and torturing everyone else around her. It's also hard to ignore that there were those who went out to Syria and did think, what the fuck, and came home almost immediately. Those like Shamima Begum stayed out there with ISIS until the bitter end. She only wanted to come back after it all went wrong. Yeah, she was happily married to her jihadist husband, having kids, living in the caliphate. Like, she never expressed anything of like,

I'm trying to escape, I'm trying to get out of here, please help me find a way back to the UK. She doesn't even say that now. Well, she kind of says that now, but it's like after fucking years after the caliphate fell. She was happy to stay there. She was, by all accounts, happy. She wanted to stay.

So here we are. Welcome to Nitty Gritty Town. Were Shamima and those like her groomed and tricked into going out to Syria? Groomed, yes. I think we've made our point that, you know, we do think she was definitely groomed. Tricked, kind of yes and no. Some women were taken by their husbands or families. Some women were lured to Syria using the feminism like we talked about last week. Some were seduced using love and romance. The Independent even did an interview with a former recruiter who said that

ISIS purposefully used pictures of attractive jihadist fighters to lure young British girls. And we've seen these pictures. They look like they're in boy bands. It's true. They really do. They really do. Subjectively speaking, looking at those men with their, like, floppy hair and their, like, you know, sun-beaten, windswept faces, hanging out in the desert, smiling. You're like, yeah, he looks hot, you know,

in a very, like, crass teenage way. Speaking of, one of Mahmood's helpers in Sabaya, you only see him in two shots, but he is a smoking hottie. Oh, my God. I was like, get back. Who is he? I want to know about him. There you go, guys. So if you want to get Hannah out to Syria to help with some of these Yazidi volunteering escape parties,

then just give us a number of the hottie, the absolute hottie that's in the latest documentary, Sabaya. Thanks very much. You know exactly which one it is, too. Don't lie. I do. I do. And we're 30-year-old women and we're saying this. Imagine like a bunch of 15-year-old girls looking at these pictures of boys

who essentially look like they're in a fucking jihadist boy band. Which brings us to maybe the favorite section of this show, as it could happen. Name your best jihadist boy band name, Hannah. Let's think of some. I was in the pub on Saturday really trying to brainstorm some with my friend who said that I had to cite her, but I can't remember all of the names. So I'll just cite her now.

Hi, Shona. I appreciated your help very much. She also said to tell people that she's single and looking. And I was like, Nate, we're literally on this show every week and we're both single. What makes you think I'll be able to find you a boyfriend? But there we go. It's been said. Right. best jihadist boy band names Hannah hit me do I have to go first okay let me think of what okay this isn't very good but I can't remember all of them I was very drunk Mujahideen and Sons like Mumford and Sons it's okay it's okay yeah it's not a round of

applause but it's like yeah all right got right. Got it. Sure. Sure. You had to explain it, but whatever. Okay. Some of these I'm more pleased with than others. Okay. I also came up with them at six o'clock this morning. So we'll see. Okay. Caveats done.

Let's both do names. I've just gone with more of a, like a basis of existing boy band names. Okay. Boys to radicalized extremists. Great. Makes sense and is true. You can also have boys to Mujahideen. I don't know which one I like more.

Oh, I think I like boys to Mujahideen. I think that's the winner so far. Okay. Well, fucking hold on to your fucking shit. I'll do one. I kind of got distracted and instead of doing like existing band names, started thinking of song names. Hotel Caliphate.

Ah, nice. Shona said Caliphate Dreaming. That could be one. Yes, we could. You go. Okay. East 17 Virgins. The next one I haven't even bothered to change. Blazing Squad. Perfect. That's it. That's

the winner. Blazing Squad. Done. Oh no, I've got more. I've got more. Okay, go. Okay. Actually, no, I'm going to leave the one that I didn't finish. We can workshop afterwards. This is my favorite one and the one I'm definitely going to hell for. Okay. Hit me. I'm going to try and say it without laughing. Mohamed. Mohamed, no problems. Excellent. Excellent. You did it. You nailed it.

There's something in there like, I don't know, bullet for my Valentine, bullet for my... Something, yeah. Sabaya, I don't know. Anyway, there you go, guys. We tried. If you've got a jihadist boy band name, hit us up on social media with them because the research for this was so relentlessly grim you'll notice the last two weeks of episodes have been very low on the joke front because it's just not very funny is it so now you've had your comic relief it's all you're fucking getting we're gonna tie us back to what we were saying last week

these girls back in the uk would have been restricted in terms of boys and flirting and dating and certainly boy bands. No Ben from A1 posters for them. So now, here's Isis offering you a chance to hook up with a Hizb-a-Hotty and take control of your own destiny. These groomers and radicalisers knew how to alter their approach depending on the person they were going after. And perhaps these women may have had quite a rude awakening

once actually in Raqqa. So yes, you can say that they were groomed. But tricked is a tricky one. Tricked by what? Some of these women were absolutely no doubt radicalised by images of the violence perpetrated by ISIS, like the beheading of journalists and aid workers. As we know, ISIS did not make a secret of this.

They were showing it everywhere. They were writing in the big, backing it up with religious justifications. And so if this kind of thing spoke to these women and girls and that kind of visual imagery of graphic violence made them want to go out there. And they weren't tricked because that is what was happening. And while we can't know for sure what specific thing tipped a person like Shamima Begum over the edge, whether it was, say, the feminism argument, whether it was the opportunity to hook up with a Hizb-e-Hati, or whether it was the graphic images of violence,

we do know that ISIS made no secret of their brutality, so there's no way you can tell me that these women and girls had never come across the brutality being committed by ISIS. As we have discussed, the violence, the murder and the rape, it's all a key part of ISIS's belief system, and they feel justified doing it, so they never hid it quite the opposite. We also know, as we touched upon earlier in this episode, that ISIS used the rape that they condoned, particularly of, say, Yazidi women, as a recruiting tool for men. Men, lured by that

kind of thing, knowing that they could have unfettered access to women's bodies like this, are clearly despicable. So why, when we know that these women and girls who went also had access to seeing the same kind of brutality, because ISIS, they're marketing geniuses, but they're not doing like, what's the word, like segmented marketing. They're not like, we'll send the men who might be into rape this message, and we'll send the women who might be into boy band lookalikes this message. Everybody was getting everything. Everybody was seeing everything. And so if these women were seeing the same kind of thing, reading the same kind of horrendous justifications for things like rape and murder in Dabiq, and they still went to Syria to join ISIS, why is it that we give them

such a benefit of the doubt? That like idea that, oh, the men who went were bad because they were lured there by the violence and the rape. But these women, they were tricked. They didn't know anything about all the violence and the rape that ISIS were doing. They couldn't possibly have. I think too often in the world of crime, particularly, Hannah and I have come across time and time again this erosion of female culpability.

It's as if women have absolutely no agency, no ability to make decisions in the same way that men do, and for fucked up reasons like we say that men do. Just because women were oppressed by ISIS, make no mistake that plenty of the women, particularly the foreign women, were a part of that oppression. So yeah, it feels unbelievable to me to think that the women who went out there had no idea of the violence being committed. I think they perhaps just didn't think it would happen to them. And so making the they were just innocent people and kids who were tricked argument hard to 100% take on board for me. I think there's just different levels of it,

isn't it? Because like, say people who joined cults, like people who joined the People's Temple. Say you went there in the OG days where Jim Jones was preaching equality and, you know, racial equality, things like this. And then things went tits up and you were still in there because you were so brainwashed. I could give you a pass that you went out there originally with a positive ideology nobody who went out to join ISIS who was radicalized by the messages they were putting out there went there with a positive ideology that then went fucking tits up they knew what ISIS were doing from the start and they thought it was justified and they thought it was righteous and that's the thing that I don't want to get lost in the conversation. And some people who've studied ISIS and those who've joined them feel even more strongly than that. For example, Vera Miranova,

a Harvard research fellow who has conducted masses of research into the women who went to Syria, said on the Times podcast, Saruti's absolute favourite of all time, Stories of Our Times, she said, quote, Those girls are not victims. They were not groomed. And in many cases, the women were actually the ones who took their families. Vera also claims that according to her research, many of the women who joined ISIS were more radical than the men were and that they were all only too happy to play the role of oppressor whilst out there.

I wonder whether it's kind of a bit Stanford prison experimentee of these girls who have no say in their own lives in the UK being tempted by, like, come to Syria and you can tell everyone what to do. And when you look at everything we've discussed so far over this two-parter, like what's happening in the camps where women are in the majority and very much running the show, because it's them that are reinstalling brutal Sharia law that punishes other women.

And then there's the actions of the female morality police, the Hizb ut-Tahrir, including the Al-Qa'ansar Brigade and their torture tools. Plus the fact that during ISIS rule, women apparently ran many of the Sharia courts, dishing out punishments to other women, like being stoned to death for accusations of adultery. And also the fact that many women, especially the foreign women, actively took part in the sexual slavery trade of the Yazidi women. According to Yazidi survivors, the wives were just as bad as the men. And we can't ignore that Shamima Begum, who claims that

she was only ever a housewife out in Raqqa, has been accused of being part of a morality police unit. And to be honest, it sounds like even being just a housewife is pretty bad. Yeah, exactly. So the thing we have to understand about ISIS, especially when we're talking about women, is that compared to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who are solely male-run organizations, is that the relationship between the so-called Islamic State and its female members is and always has been incredibly complicated. Because yes, absolutely, the group heavily restricts the freedoms of women, there's no denying that. But ISIS also conscripted and trained many women to be involved in key roles within the organization, including fighting on the front lines, being a part of these Hizb ut-Or morality police units, and also taking part in terror attacks. So we just can't treat all of the women who are out there as monolithic, as if they were all tricked, as if they were all just sheeple, they were all groomed, they had no idea what was going on

and they were all being oppressed. The reason Al-Qaeda and Taliban don't have women like ISIS do is because ISIS made a role for those women within the organization and these women were like, fuck, yes. So each case needs to be dealt with individually. Some women may have been committing acts of terrorism and brutality out there and some may not. The problem is that obviously this kind of detailed case management looking at every case individually is not something that can happen in camps like Al-Hol and Al-Raj. These places are a complete mess, to put it mildly,

and the people there have no prospect of a trial. And I think it's very ironic that we Brits and Europeans who shook our heads at Guantanamo Bay now absolutely stink of hypocrisy. In fact, Al-Hol has been nicknamed Europe's Guantanamo since so many of those trapped there are from here. So, now what? What do we do, apart from continue to come up with jihadi boy band names? It's complicated, definitely.

But if the argument is that these people are too extreme and too dangerous to be brought back to Europe, keeping them in camps is also not a great idea. It's actually not a solution at all. Leaving everyone mixed up altogether there, with these camps being run by the most extreme and radical amongst them, is a recipe for even more radicalisation. And this isn't just the message from bleeding-heart liberals. Richard Barrett, head of the counter-terrorism unit at MI6, says that these people need to be brought back immediately because the longer they are there, the harder it becomes to assess the risk. And if we're hoping that just

by leaving them all there, they will somehow all die off or disappear, it's not the case. What we're doing is creating a breeding ground for the return of ISIS. Just consider right now around 22,000 kids living in those camps. What's going to happen to those kids growing up surrounded by radicals? And also consider that the imagery of women and children locked up in desert detention centres with no access to proper shelter, proper like sanitation, healthcare, education, etc. Again, that kind of imagery makes for prime propaganda for ISIS to utilize. Here is once again the West turning its back on its own citizens, oppressing Muslim women and children. That's like the fucking dream for ISIS to stick in their fucking magazine. So say we do bring these people back

and actually manage to convict and imprison them. Radicalization in prisons is already a problem. But saying that, if they were brought back, like we said, it's highly unlikely that there would be enough evidence to put most of them in prison on terror charges anyway. So the rest of them would have to go free. And I do have to wonder, is that the right thing to do? Obviously, I don't think so. I do think those people should be tracked. Because I just think, can we say that these women pose no threat? I've seen people saying that on social media. I've seen people saying that these people don't pose a threat. But I'm like, how can we say that? How can you say that? And is it a risk we're willing to take? And it's also, I would argue, as I always do, because they're women,

and I think we completely overlook the fact that Shumima herself was radicalised by a woman. People just don't think women are dangerous. We fucking are. Absolutely. And this is exactly the point of like, we cannot just give people the benefit of the doubt to that extent that they don't pose a threat. They need to be brought back here and managed properly. We know that ISIS towards the end removed one of their most important caveats, that people were forbidden from leaving the so-called caliphate on pain of death. ISIS likely lifted this ban because they knew that they were fucked

and many reports indicate that they told people that they were allowed to leave, go back, build networks again, and then they were fucked. And many reports indicate that they told people that they were allowed to leave, go back, build networks again, and then they will rebuild. So we really can't ignore the danger that these people may pose because it was an instruction. Absolutely. You cannot ignore the fact that for the entirety of the time the so-called caliphate was there, people were not allowed to leave. And then they're suddenly like, oh, actually, you can leave now. Go back. Go back immediately to the European country you came from. Why? ISIS don't care about saving those people's lives. We know that. They want them to go back so that they can start again and rebuild from within. And again, you don't know how many of these people still hold that ideology in their head. For sure. I'm not saying all of them do, but some of them might. But saying all of that, we also can't leave them where they are because it's not right legally,

and it's not right ethically, which, as you will know if you've listened to the show even once before, are not always the same thing. Especially when you consider there are children stuck in those camps. It's also not fair morally, considering that we're leaving the Kurds to pick up after our mess, and for other countries to take in people radicalised in the UK and in Europe. So for those citing security issues, well, leaving people in the camps is also a security issue and not a good idea in terms of safety. And I think another challenge for many liberal governments is that public sentiment is not largely on the side of bringing these people back. It's like I said, my knee-jerk reaction was, why the fuck we want to bring them back? And it wasn't until I thought about, well,

then who has to take responsibility for these people that I changed my opinion on that. But I think a lot of people are like, we don't fucking want them here. And I think if a government were to make a move to bring those people back, you know that the far right would be absolutely chomping at the bit to let loose on the kind of propaganda they could utilise for that. I don't even think it would be the far right, to be honest. No, no, no. Just a hair right of centre, I would argue. So let's say that the Brits in those camps were brought home and they couldn't be convicted of a crime.

Can someone like Shamima Begum be de-radicalised? Well, it is not an easy thing to de-radicalize someone. The radicalization process forces people into a black and white way of thinking. And it creates a situation in which the radicalized person's life becomes completely consumed with fear. I watched a documentary where a woman who has since been de-radicalized talked about her experience. And the most interesting point that she made that I thought was how once she had been radicalized, the next life, so post-death paradise, was the only thing that she worried about. Because that would be forever and that would be real. Once she was radicalized, this woman started to feel like this life, this world, right now, all stopped mattering.

It wasn't real anymore. It was just a dream. And you can see how thinking that way makes it a whole lot easier to kill anyone who gets in your way. If you think it's not real, it's kind of like a video game. It's just a practice run. You're really preparing for what lies beyond after the apocalypse. And the woman also said that she was convinced that even if she accidentally killed an innocent person during, you know, committing a terror attack, it didn't matter because God is just and he knows all. So that person who you accidentally killed, maybe they are, you know, a righteous person, but it doesn't matter because God would judge them appropriately. And if they were a good person, then they'd just go to heaven anyway. So whatever, it doesn't really matter that

you killed them. No harm, no foul. Yeah, it's just out of your hands. Just doesn't matter. You ended that person's dream state. And in fact, you helped them because now they've gone to paradise. So whatever. All the research shows that people need to disengage and have less contact with radicals before they can even think about changing their beliefs. Even in extremist circles, it's very rare that people have absolutely no doubts or cracks in what they are being asked to do or believe in. And obviously, maybe she's making it up, maybe she isn't. But in The Return, Shamima writes a letter to her 15-year-old self. And she says something to the effect of,

please don't do this thing I know in your heart you're really not that sure about. Oh, absolutely. And I think with Shamima Begum's case, if you do watch The Return, you see there that I don't think she was the most confident of the three. I don't think she was the ringleader.

I actually think it was probably Amira Abbas because she was definitely the one that came across as the most intelligent, the one that came across as the most organized possibly. I think Shamima Begum went because she didn't really have a close relationship with her family. Her friends are suddenly all going on this trip together. They're all excited, probably all they can talk about because of all the planning needed. And I think probably while she was obviously into the ideology, I think it was also just the teenage thing of not wanting to be left out. Also, it's pretty key to remember that not everybody who joins ISIS wants to kill anyone or carry out terror attacks.

So to get through to these people and to de-radicalise them, you need the right tools. And you also need to separate them from the source of the radical ideology that radicalised them in the first place. Therefore, it follows leaving these vulnerable people in camps means it is impossible to break the cycle of radicalization because not only are they scared for their lives, they can't get away from it. How can you start to repair a very damaged and traumatized brain if all it's receiving is the same information? But having said that, like with all forms of

rehabilitation, I'm not really sure that everyone can be rehabilitated or de-radicalised. And we've seen horrific real-life cases with devastating results. Take, for example, the man who carried out the 2019 London Bridge attack. He'd been in prison for eight years and took part in two de-radicalisation programmes. He was thought to be responding well as of late December 2018. And then just a year later, he killed eight people and injured almost 50. And I remember the London Bridge attacks. I mean, it was so recently. I was shocked when I was making these notes. I was like, it was in 2019. It's like just two years

ago. And like, I've got a good friend who works in Borough Market. And I had good friends who work in London Bridge who go out on a Friday night to drink in Borough Market and that's where some of the attack happened and it was just fucking unbelievable the thought that I was like texting my friends to be like are you okay worrying that they might have been killed in a fucking terror attack and I think this is the thing of why this obviously hits so close to home. You don't need to even be personally affected by terrorism to feel a visceral rage for these kind of people, for people who would sympathize with this kind of ideology. I don't know if I've ever told you this before, but it was quite fucking crazy shit. But when September 11th happened, my dad used to work at Lehman Brothers and he was obviously in the London office and he was on the phone as they were every morning to the Lehman Brothers New York office, which was in the World Trade Center.

They were on the phone to them, conference call, room full of people in London. Suddenly there's a bang and the phone cuts out. They turn on the news. It's because the planes had fucking hit their office. It's like unbelievable when I heard that story yeah and they were like the phone just went dead with a group of people that are their colleagues and they were on the phone too because the fucking plane had hit it's mad so coming back to this and what do we do I think and this is my personal opinion is that these people should be brought back because they are our responsibility.

And they should be held, in my opinion, until they engage in and complete vital de-radicalization programs. I don't believe you just bring them back here and because you can't convict them, we just let them go. That's some fucking bullshit. Like, they need to be held properly and they need to be made to engage in de-radicalization programs. And then I think they should absolutely continue to be monitored after that. I think we should give these people, like, the full opportunity and ability to be rehabilitated. But I also believe that not everyone can be saved or changed or de-radicalized. And I don't think that we should be naive as to the threat that they may pose

until they're properly assessed. I think the point is that this case draws up so much toxicity and so much like polarizing conversation. But I think it's just we can't afford to start thinking in the same black and white way that these extremists do. You know, he's my enemy, so he should die. I think that's how the extremists think. And I just don't think we should think that way. These cases are awash with millions of shades of grey. It's not black and white. But I don't think it's not black and white about whether what ISIS did was right or wrong or even for me really whether what Shamima Begum did and those like her

did was right or wrong because I do think they were radicalised by things that are horrific like the images of violence and rape etc. But I think it's more about whether what we're doing is right or wrong. I think that's the thing that we need to be critical of. And I think that for me, Bethan McKernan, the Middle East correspondent for The Guardian, put it best, I thought, summing up this whole situation about the camps and what we should do with these people, when she wrote, quote, what is happening in Al-Hol is a humanitarian crisis starring unsympathetic protagonists. So here we are, the end of the road.

We've made it. This is where we are going to wrap up this absolutely enormous two-parter on Shamima Begum and ISIS. For now, ISIS has been stamped out, but with the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it may only be a matter of time before we see ISIS return. We're actually going to talk about the situation in Afghanistan

on this week's Under the Duvet. We were going to put it in the episode, but it would have made it two and a half hours long. So hop on over to Under the Duvet if you want to hear that. So yeah, that is patreon.com forward slash red-handed. Become a patron. Everyone gets Under the Duvet if you want to hear that. So yeah, that is patreon.com forward slash red handed. Become a patron. Everyone gets Under the Duvet $5 and up. And on the subject of Afghanistan, we have thought about how to handle it at length. We're absolutely heartbroken to see what's happening. So to help in the smallest way we

can, I suppose, we're going to be making donations to emergency support for Afghan women and Afghan aid. If you would like to support a charity doing invaluable work on the ground in Afghanistan right now, we will leave a bunch of links in the episode description and they will all be charities

that we have checked thoroughly because that is something that everyone should be quite careful of. There are fucking shitheads out there taking advantage of this situation, so make sure you don't get taken in by them. Other than that, just have thoughts. Have some thoughts, have some thinking.

Try not to engage in the same kind of radical black and white thinking that ISIS wants its members to do. My back hurts because I'm standing and it's been an hour and 45 minute record. So let's wrap up with some thanks to some patrons who signed up at some point last year. So thank you so much to Abigail Walker, Esful Teffi, sorry, Laura Thurgood, Stephanie De Freitas,

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I get it. Lots of people don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness.

And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time

to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time if all goes to plan we'll be finding Andy.

You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app Apple Podcasts or Spotify.