With her aviator shades, baseball cap, pink nail varnish and vest top, Shamima Begum looks just like any young woman her age.
Hard to believe that this 23-year-old Londoner is a former member of terrorist group ISIS.
A former Jihadi bride who ran away from her family home in 2015 to join a brutal genocidal regime when she was just 15 and once said that seeing the severed heads of terror victims in bins “didn’t faze me”.
The Shamima Begum Story, on BBC2 on Tuesday, saw the exiled prisoner give her account of the last eight years for the very first time.
“I thought I was going to an Islamic utopia,” Shamima insisted. “I did not know about the atrocities.”
Could she seriously have been unaware of the monstrous crimes of ISIS?
Speaking to journalist Josh Baker, Shamima told how she got on the bus one morning to Gatwick and fled to Turkey with two friends, before being smuggled across the border to Syria.
“I lied and said I had extra classes to go to. My mum believed me,” she recalled. “I said goodbye to her and got on the bus and left.”
She described her journey as “kind of exciting”, having turned to religion to be accepted by friends and believing the Islamic State propaganda after feeling she never really fitted in in Britain.
Four years later, pregnant with her third child, Shamima emerged, desperate to come home. But she showed little remorse and the British Government decided to revoke her British citizenship, leaving her in a Syrian prison camp.
She remains a divisive figure. Some claiming she was a victim of child trafficking, groomed and abused, while others have labelled her a danger and a traitor who joined a terror group with her eyes open. It’s the ultimate villain or victim story and I can’t decide on which side of the fence to fall.
I felt sympathy as she described the devastating deaths of her three children, to malnutrition and pneumonia.
She also described years of restriction and abuse from her Jihadi fighter husband.
But as the film tried to get to the truth of her involvement in ISIS, amid claims of training and recruiting, her denials seemed unconvincing.
“I made excuses for them,” she said. “I feel ashamed of myself.”
The extent of Shamima’s crimes may still be unclear, but she did seem to seek redemption when she said: “ISIS was the worst thing of the 21st century. I was a part of it and now I have to face the consequences of my actions.”
Her dream has clearly become a nightmare, but is it too little too late?
