There is a television program called Escape to the Country which I imagine may have influenced the young 15 year old schoolgirl Shamima Begum to have made the long and arduous journey from her home in Great Britain through Turkey and into Syria.
One never knows whether a move to the countryside will be beneficial until one has tried the life, especially if one is a town dweller, myself I was lucky and took to it like the proverbial duck to water.
How could this unfortunate young lady envision what was to be in store for her when she embarked on the trip of a lifetime to the idyllic caliphate which the terrorist group ISIS had established in Syria?
All the glossy brochures and publicity videos presented the ideal environment in which to bring up your family in the middle of a war zone, after all what could possibly go wrong?
Suffice to say this unfortunate young child seems to have made yet another unfortunate mistake when some 10 days after arriving in Raqqa she married Yago Riedijk a young Dutch boy who turned out to be a convicted terrorist associated with a group who were planning to bomb a fairground in Arnhem. How unlucky can you be?
The saga continues for during breaks when her terrorist husband was not off fighting they managed to have two children, both it seems who died from sickness and malnutrition and yet this plucky youngster stuck it out to the end.
Finally, when the caliphate was almost totally decimated and down to the last stronghold of Bughuz she fled and took refuge in a refugee camp, where heavily pregnant and now 19 years old she gave birth to her third child.
It was at this point that her story started to be told, “at first it was wonderful,” she said, adding “they don’t have any evidence against me doing anything dangerous.”
“When I went to Syria I was just a housewife, the entire four years I stayed at home, took care of my husband, took care of my kids. I never did anything. I never made propaganda, I never encouraged people to come to Syria.”
She went on to say that she wasn’t even fazed by seeing severed heads in bins, although quite how an innocent housewife was in close proximity to severed heads was not explained.
Her lawyer Tasnime Akunjee has asked that she be allowed to come home to Great Britain to bring up her child as she is no threat and is going out of his way to tone down some of the more controversial comments she has made, for example that the bombing at Manchester Arena where 23 people died could be justified from an Islamic point of view.
She may have a point but I still have a bit of a problem with the image of an innocent housewife putting the rubbish bins out and asking her husband, “do these severed heads go in the black or the recycling bin?”
The Diary of a Country Bumpkin 
Ummm, yah. This sounds insane.
I’m glad I’m not the person who has to decide what happens next to Shamima. Whatever the decision, there will be some kind of outcry.
Events have moved on very quickly and it seems the decision has been made. I have a nasty feeling that if left as she is the next time she surfaces it will be wearing a suicide vest.
This week, my son and I followed this story with interest. My son described her as a vulnerable child, at least she was as a fifteen year old, a child easily influenced and ripe for indoctrination by others.
What to do with her now? I do not know what the answer is. There are others just like her and if we don’t take them back they become someone else’s problem.
I was somewhat surprised they don’t want her back to put her on trial, although getting evidence would be hard but you can at least attempt to de-radicalise her when she’s home. Whereas elsewhere I’m fairly certain that left as she is, she will turn up again unfortunately next time she will probably be wearing a suicide vest.
I’m in agreement Joe. I wonder what happened to the other two I don’t remember either of them being mentioned.
I have a vague recollection that one is dead and the other was with her husband fighting to the death. It’s so sad when you think they were once perfectly normal middle class schoolgirls and now they’re not fazed by beheaded heads in a bin!
A friend of my daughter, once an honest and happy middle class young girl took up with a bad lot, some years older, and became influenced to a degree that she thought there was nothing wrong in stealing, fraud, and violence. He does what he has to do was her response. Her parents are mortified and firmly believe she has been brainwashed, no longer able to think for herself.
Although this situation is on a different level it’s easy to understand what happened to her.
It’s a very strange world in which we live, especially nowadays. It seems to me that each generation seems to be more lax than the previous one. In my day the grownups were in charge, now the children seem to think they are!
Taking care of her 2 children?? She let them die of starvation. How did this happen? Surely if there was not enough food to feed little ones she’d have been hard pushed to find food to feed herself and her no good husband….She doesn’t look underfed to me. Let her go to flipping Holland with her Dutch husband……why does she want to come here?? Perhaps she’s expecting us to let her no good hubby in on humanitarian grounds….
Have you ever heard of sarcasm, it’s a type of humour often used by British people, the definition of which is; the use of irony to mock or convey contempt. I would suggest it might be worth reading my post again and see if you understand it better. Unless of course your comment is sarcasm and I have missed your point.
This was really funny. You have a great sense of humor. I know, it’s not a funny subject but I can only process these things with humor or sarcasm otherwise I will go crazy. Sigh.
Hi
I tagged you for a Picture Challenge
https://saltedcaramel670.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/the-lost-city-a-picture-challenge/