A new documentary reveals what daily life is like for the 'Isis brides' now held in camps in Syria – including the Bethnal Green schoolgirl who has been denied the right to return to Britain. The award-winning war correspondent Anthony Loyd, who first found Begum in February 2019, talks to the film-makers.
One day in Roj camp Shamima Begum sat back in a wooden cart used as an improvised pram by the women detainees. Spare-framed and expressionless, she watched a group of mothers and their children playing with kites. After a while a single teardrop rolled down her face.
Watching her from a distance, Alba Sotorra noticed the moment as the first time she had ever seen the girl from Bethnal Green cry. The Spanish film-maker had met Begum many times by then. It was the spring of 2019. She recalled Begum, who had lost all her friends, her three children, her citizenship, and become the banished and broken teenage chalice of Britain's hate, as being so traumatised that she was almost incapable of expression.
"In the beginning, Shamima was like a ghost just sitting there, covered, lifeless, like a marionette, a doll," recalls Sotorra, who was inside the Syrian detention camp to make a film about a workshop run by a Kurdish woman for the Islamic State-affiliated women incarcerated there. Begum was one of a small group, most of them mothers, who participated. To begin with, she sat alone at the back of a tent in silence.
"Her lack of ability to express her feelings made me feel deeply sad for her," Sotorra continues. "Then, maybe two months after I met her, we had this game with the kids. The kids were playing with kites. Shamima was always very silent. And she sat on one of these carts watching. I saw a teardrop fall from her eye. It was the first time."
Sotorra made no attempt to record the moment on film and the incident will undoubtedly be met with a howl of rage by those who prefer to regard Shamima Begum not as a profoundly traumatised young woman overwhelmed by the magnitude and consequence of decisions she made when a Year 11 schoolgirl at Bethnal Green Academy, but as a remorseless individual, devoid of regret, so dangerous that she poses a threat to the nation's security.
Three months earlier, I had found Shamima Begum in al-Hawl camp, one of two internment centres in northeast Syria that hold a total of 64,000 women and children, including 13,500 foreigners, from Isis-affiliated families. Most are children under five years old; 16 British women and 35 children are held among them.
The only survivor among three school friends from Bethnal Green who had run away from London to live in the caliphate in February 2015, within days of speaking to me in 2019 Shamima Begum had her citizenship stripped by the home secretary, Sajid Javid. She gave birth to a baby boy who died three weeks later, her third child to die in the space of a few months.
She is currently detained in Roj camp, in a better managed, less overcrowded environment than al-Hawl, where disease and killing remain rife. Though conditions in Roj are austere, tents in the camp are equipped with electricity and televisions, and detainees are banned from wearing black clothing.
Earlier this year the Supreme Court, despite hearing evidence she may have been trafficked and was a victim of child marriage, ruled that Shamima Begum could not return to this country to challenge the removal of her citizenship as she is a threat to national security.
The media's portrayal of Shamima Begum has been a driving force behind the government's refusal to allow her return. Their reports are riven with failure. The written word, allowing such a broad range of subjective interpretation, largely fails to convey the complex reality of Shamima Begum's story, and most newspaper reports fall into a binary paradigm, describing her either as a victim or a perpetrator. This in turn elicits polarised public responses, sympathetic or retributive, and provides too few of the tools needed to establish the four key pillars – fact, context, responsibility and accountability – by which Begum's case should be examined if ever she is to be allowed home. Television reporting also fails her story. Most interviews with her appear predatory. The worst involve an aggressive, gleeful schadenfreude that sets her up to fail.
Conventional mediums of journalism were always going to struggle in calibrating a subject that involved a "vulnerable teenager" (the phrase used by the Metropolitan Police to describe Shamima Begum in a letter written for her family in February 2015, before she left the UK), motherhood, dead babies and a decision to live within the remit of the most repugnant terrorist organisation in modern times.
Lawyers, absent in war and dependent on correspondents for information, but flocking in its aftermath and suddenly critical of the media for interviewing detained clients, do no better in advancing her case or the cases of the other British women held in Syrian camps. Indeed, simplistic exculpatory legal arguments threaten to trivialise the complexity of the choices made by these women, and may further antagonise public opinion against those behind the wire.
I take my own bow in this pantheon of failure. Almost every remark that Shamima Begum made when we met that fateful February 13, 2019, has been utilised, regardless of context, in the government's case to revoke her citizenship: printed out and put before judges with the Special Immigration Appeals Commission as proof of her threat; used to consolidate her banishment despite every argument I made to the contrary.
However, something has just changed in the telling of Shamima Begum's story. Alba Sotorra's sensitive and unusual film from Roj camp, The Return: Life after Isis, showing on Sunday in the UK for the first time at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival, gives the banished London woman the chance to express herself on a platform of trust with interlocutors that she has not previously had with any journalist.
Told through the prism of Sevinaz Evdike, the Kurdish woman running a creative writing workshop in Roj camp for the detainees, The Return examines the experiences of Shamima Begum and five other Isis-affiliated women through Evdike's own journey, as she grapples with the memory of dead family and friends killed fighting against Islamic State.
In this way, the film allows its audience to judge Shamima Begum and her companions participating in the workshop only after it has first judged itself against Evdike's inspiring efforts to engage with those who came to her country uninvited, to join a caliphate whose borders were drawn in Kurdish blood.
Even the most choleric armchair critic of Begum might first have to wonder why Syrian Kurds, who suffered so egregiously at the hands of Islamic State and provided the core of the ground force that eventually destroyed the caliphate, are willing to open dialogue with Isis-affiliated women in Roj camp, while those so far from the Syrian killing fields are not.
Indeed, dialogue lies at the heart of The Return. The revenants in the workshop have their own internal dialogue as they re-engage with life after Islamic State, while at the same time being engaged in dialogue with women from the force that defeated Isis.
Sotorra, 41, an experienced documentary-maker who has been visiting northeastern Syria since 2015, is succinct in describing the need for dialogue not just as a means to start defusing the threat posed by the internment of the thousands of foreign women currently in Roj and al-Hawl camps, whose children will grow to adulthood with their citizenship of origin intact, but also as a preventative measure to break further cycles of violence.
"I was inspired by the Kurdish women," she says, "who had experienced Isis violence in the most extreme way, yet who are somehow the first ones to have opened a space for dialogue with their former enemies. In the aftermath of a war, when you have been involved in so much violence, you have to realise that there is no way out. You need to break this circle of violence. You need to find a way to connect to those who were your enemies – because you cannot be fighting endlessly."
The first days of film-making in Roj camp were predictably tense. It was the end of March 2019, just over a year after the last territorial slither of Islamic State's caliphate had been destroyed by a Kurdish-led force at Baghouz. Trust was zero. The antipathy felt by Kurdish members of the all-female film crew towards internees in the camp was so acute that in breaks between shooting they preferred to go outside the perimeter fence to relax rather than be near Isis-affiliated females. The atmosphere was further complicated by threats from more extreme Isis women towards those who wanted to participate in the workshop, and the small group who did attend spoke to Evdike in such a wooden, contrived manner that at first Sotorra wondered if the film was possible at all.
Meantime, as carrier of the film's conscience, Evdike was in acute internal turmoil during those early days. The 29-year-old activist is a member of the Kurdish Women's Movement, whose revolutionary ideology espouses the necessity of emancipating women as a way of recalibrating society. From this perspective, Evdike regarded the internees as being in need of her help, as victims of an extremist patriarchal society that had allowed women little personal choice, confining them to the roles of housewives and child breeders.
Yet Evdike was also revolted by her own experiences of the war with Isis. Four of her cousins, two men and two women, had been killed fighting Islamic State. Her uncle was killed by Islamist militias, her home destroyed. Evdike's best friend was murdered while eight months pregnant during an Isis assault on a government hall in Qamishli. Even as Evdike slowly warmed to the women in the workshop, recall of the suffering inflicted by Islamic State shadowed her days.
Burdened with this accumulation of pain, she consciously avoided reading details of any of the women attending her creative writing workshop in Roj, so knew nothing of their personal histories. "It was the first time I saw anyone from Isis up close and face to face," Evdike recalls of her first meeting with the women. "It felt like I was speaking with an enemy, but my ideology refuses to allow me to say that. Then I saw that, though they are the enemy, they were also women inside a tent who needed help. They needed support."
Shamima Begum's role in the film came by happenstance. She was neither known to Evdike, nor was someone Sotorra had specifically sought out, but had chosen to attend the workshop of her own volition.
At first the Bethnal Green girl barely spoke. Even among the women in Roj camp, who had been sequestered in their households during the time of the caliphate and were discouraged from independent thought or expression, trust was scarce, and it took time for the workshop group members to bond before individuals developed the confidence to speak out in a tent with a camera rolling.
However as time passed Evdike grew to like her. The description she gave me of Shamima Begum – defined as a threat to the UK's national security by the Supreme Court – was this: "I found Shamima to be the most honest one and also the most childish. She's a kid, horrified at losing her own three kids, ripped apart by that loss. She's not a threat to anyone; she's totally broken, totally gone. She needs at least ten years of help – a lot of help."
The workshop was no soft option. Its aim was to empower women through internal dialogue, and to trigger the necessary levels of self-reflection the women were shown Islamic State propaganda films, footage of destruction left by the group and clips of interviews the women had made with journalists. They were then encouraged to talk about themselves and their reasoning for coming to Syria, as in turn Evdike explained to them her own experiences of war and loss in the face of Islamic State.
Written projects for the workshop included a daily diary, letters written to their imagined selves in ten years' time and their past selves as they prepared to travel to Syria; recollections of dreams and recollections of nightmares. (They were also asked to write to their mothers, but none could complete the task for shame.)
One of the first breakthroughs in trust came around the appearance of fruit and chocolate in the women's dreams, along with dream-state recollections of being able to provide bountiful food for their children. These dreams introduced the shared recall of wartime hunger both to the film crew, five of whom were Syrian Kurds, and to the Isis affiliates attending Evdike's workshop. Little by little, the women found commonality in pain: pain of hunger, pain of fear, pain of rage, pain of grief.
"Pain can be a common ground to connect," Sotorra notes. "We live with pain together. We cause pain to each other. Pain is something we share. We can heal from that."
Yet the real extent of this shared experience is hard to gauge. Recognising personal pain is certainly a key step to internal dialogue, yet it only gains utility if it leads to an understanding of another's suffering. Without that connection, empathy does not exist, and without empathy the mere awareness of personal pain often enforces a dangerous sense of victimhood.
While The Return does not hold back from its depiction of Isis atrocities, and discussions of shared hardship and loss regularly take place, Evdike remains circumspect about how far those attending the workshop really grasped the pain caused in Syria by Islamic State.
"When we didn't have the cameras on, some of them, I wouldn't say all, would talk with me about moments from the war, but I could tell it was something they felt horrible to talk about, ashamed or embarrassed," she says. "They were ashamed, but at the same time they were trying to protect themselves by saying, 'We didn't know. We came with our husbands,' or, 'We were frustrated because Muslims in Europe have no base.' Some of them said that they had just come to help the Syrian people, and didn't know this was going to hurt us. Most of the conversations were like this."
The activist was unafraid to challenge such denials. A telling moment in the film comes when a Canadian Isis affiliate at the workshop named Kimberly warbles away any sense of her own responsibility at having travelled to Syria.
"I think that I shouldn't be here at all," she trills glibly. "I never had so much as a parking ticket back in my own country. I never killed anybody. I never did anything."
Evdike, clearly struggling with anger, snaps back, "Maybe you did not, but maybe your husband killed my cousin, or my mother's cousin, or killed my neighbour or killed my teacher or killed my friend."
Reality checks like these preserve the film's integrity, preventing it from ever wandering too far down the victimhood road. However, the greater issue of whether or not Isis-affiliated women can really discern the level of their own responsibility in going to live within the caliphate – a decision which by definition involved marriage to Islamic State terrorists – is left largely unaddressed.
Without that recognition of responsibility, and a commitment to some sort of atonement, western societies will never accept these women back, and efforts by lawyers or human rights groups to describe them merely as victims will only antagonise, just as accusations that all are perpetrators pointlessly, erroneously inflame.
Neither during filming nor now does Evdike engage with the victim-perpetrator stereotypes so commonly used to describe the women. "If you look at them only as 'victims', well, maybe this 'victim' is a woman who killed people," she explains. "Or if not, then their husbands killed and the women saw it... They were part of it. But if you say, 'They are all killers,' this ignores the reality that some of them really were betrayed in the way they were brought here, or else have changed for the better since then. Either way, the attitude that they should just be left here in Syria, or killed, is the most horrible way of thinking of all."
Yet in terms of addressing the women's responsibility for their actions, The Return asks very little of its subjects. Hoda Muthana, for example, a 26-year-old mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, currently detained in Roj camp, previously drew national outrage in the US after she tweeted exhortations to Isis supporters to "kill" and "terrorise" Americans.
"Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them," she tweeted in 2015 using the alias Umm Jihad.
These tweets are shown in The Return, but Muthana, participating in the workshop, never accounts for them on camera, apparently on the advice of her lawyers. It is a notable omission. What else is omitted?
Paradoxically, the absence of tough questioning, combined with the slow evolution of trust between Evdike, the crew and the women attending the workshop, allows the film its greatest strength: intimacy. The women are given space, and in that space emerges a unique portrayal of their terrible sorrow. There is no doubting the suffering they all have experienced during the war. But is suffering without self-responsibility enough reason to allow them home?
Moreover, this selective group – six of the most liberal revenants who wanted to participate in Evdike's workshop and were prepared to be filmed – does not reflect the overall camp populations in Roj or al-Hawl, which include westerners who are assassins, enforcers, recruiters and propagandists.
The film is unwittingly deceptive when it comes to the Syrian Kurds too. There is no doubting Evdike's commitment to establish dialogue with the women, nor the personal ordeal that involves. Yet the notion – so skilfully played by the Kurdish authorities and misadvertised by western media – that the Kurdish self-administration in northeastern Syria would allow western women and children home were it not merely for the intransigence of the UK and Europe, is a false narrative.
The Syrian Kurds, surrounded by enemies and conscious of the international political card these women and children present, have proved deeply unwilling to repatriate them even to countries that have approved their return. The obstacles to Shamima Begum's return lie as much in Qamishli as in Whitehall.
Nevertheless, those thirsty for Shamima Begum's tears in The Return have their thirst slaked. She cries several times. She cries for her dead friends; cries for her dead children; cries to be with her mum. On each occasion, she sits with controlled poise, as if wanting to hold back something her eyes let go, so that watching her weep is like watching an Easter Island statue cry: an impression of oceanic sadness.
"I felt my whole world falling apart and I just couldn't do anything," she weeps, remembering how her children died one after the other. "I just wanted to kill myself. The only thing keeping me alive was the baby I was pregnant with. I felt like I had to do him right by getting out and giving him a normal life."
Shamima Begum was holding that thought above all others on February 13, 2019, fresh from the battle at Baghouz, when she heard a member of the Kurdish staff at al-Hawl camp mention that a British journalist was nearby and looking for her. So we met. She hoped that by speaking to me I would save the life of her unborn child.
In this way she ended up sitting in a cart a few months later watching children play with kites, a single tear running down her face, so alone that one of those there that day tells me, "It was as if her soul was skinned."
Written by: Anthony Loyd
© The Times of London