Shamima Begum's jihadi husband insists they were happily married | Daily Mail Online

Begum, an A-star pupil at Bethnal Green Academy in east London, left Britain in February 2015, with two friends who are thought to have been killed in the conflict.

Yago Riedijk, a Dutch convert, was 23 and had been injured fighting for ISIS when he married the 15-year-old, days after she arrived in Syria.

She spent four years in Syria and had three children by Riedijk, two of whom died of disease or malnutrition, and a third, born after her capture by Western-backed forces, died of pneumonia.

Begum's lawyers told an appeal against her citizenship deprivation last week that there was ‘overwhelming' evidence she was groomed and trafficked by ISIS for the purpose of ‘sexual exploitation and marriage to an adult male.'

 

 

 

‘In doing so, she was following a well-known pattern by which ISIS cynically recruited and groomed female children, as young as 14, so that they could be offered as wives to adult men,' Nick Squires, KC, told the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC).

ISIS deliberately recruited underage girls for sexual exploitation and child marriage because they were needed for the ‘bearing of children, which was an important feature of its state-building project,' he said.

However, speaking during an interview from custody in northern Syria, Riedijk made no comment when asked about the age gap.

‘Basically, I was looking for marriage and a friend of mine came to me and said there's a sister looking for marriage, are you interested? I took him up on his offer,' he said, speaking to Alan Duncan.

The former fighter described how he sat down with Begum: ‘We had a talk, we agreed on the conditions of marriage.'

The conditions were ‘not really something big or anything important, it was small things like going out shopping, things like this,' he said.

 

‘Basically she asked for some freedoms, which I agreed to give her – going shopping, seeing her friends, very, very basic stuff. We agreed on a dowry – all she asked for was an English translation of the Koran, which I agreed to.'

Riedijk then went ‘looking for a house,' he said.

‘I came across a friend of mine, he offered me to live with him and we moved in with him. We got some stuff and that was the beginning of the marriage.'

Riedijk had fought in the bloody battle for Kobane at the end of 2014, against the Kurdish forces who now hold him, and was injured during the fighting.

‘It was known to be a massacre,' he said. ‘I don't know how to describe it. Loads and loads of Islamic State fighters died there.'

Some members of his ISIS battalion – called Saif al-Dawla (Sword of ISIS) – refused to go and were thrown in jail, he said.

When he married Begum, he was ‘in recovery and doing physiotherapy,' Riedijk added.

 

‘I've never been married before, it was an experience, living together with someone for the first time, getting to know somebody from scratch, again, it was an experience.'

Asked if he was happy, Riedijk told film-maker Alan Duncan: ‘I was at that point.'

Begum kept in contact with her family but ‘I don't remember it being very often, contact with her family. With me it was a bit more often.'

But the first stage of their marriage was short: ‘We were only together for 10 days and after 10 days I got arrested, I was accused of being a spy by the Islamic State.'

However, he revealed: ‘She was pregnant at that point. I did not know and neither did she.'

‘I was denied any contact with her, even though my house was only 150 metres from the prison.

‘I asked for a visit and she came to visit me, my friend brought her, but they denied me any visitors.'

When he was eventually released Riedijk claims he distanced himself from ISIS in Raqqa, where he was living with Begum.

‘A lot of people had talked about me, basically saying I was a spy and bad things. I started to distance myself from them, hang about with the Arabic community, mostly civilians.'

After his release he went back to a ‘relatively normal life for a period of time' he said.

‘We started baking cakes, selling cakes on the market in order to make money to survive.

‘I was doing most of the cooking. We did some of it together but she was pregnant I think at the time. She was basically with the kids, we had a second child, my son Jarrah.

‘There were some nice days with the wife and kids at home. Some beautiful memories.'

However, like Begum, Riedijk spoke of seeing corpses in the streets who had been executed by ISIS.

‘Sometimes, they leave the corpses there to scare the people, sometimes you walk by,' he said.

But he said he got used to death in Raqqa: ‘Because of the coalition bombing, the regime bombing, you dig people out of the rubble all the time. It's difficult but something, unfortunately, you get used to.'

ISIS would hand out floggings for ‘crimes' from smoking to fornication, Riedijk said.

‘I never witnessed it myself but I heard about it multiple times.'

He was asked if he and Begum were expecting those sorts of punishments to be handed out before they joined ISIS and answered: ‘We knew it was present these things, we'd heard about it. It's different, it's not pleasant.'

But asked if he thought it was wrong, Riedijk answered: ‘I can't really comment.'

He added: ‘Honestly, it's war, people get killed. I have seen people get killed on all sides – the regime, Free Syrian Army (FSA), Islamic State, all sides, outside prisons, people die, get killed.'

Riedijk still hopes to rebuild his life with Begum, he said, and have more children.

‘Right now, she is surrounded in the camps by women with experience as mothers, as housewives. I hope she can take a lot from them for our future life. I hope we will be able to start a family again,' he said.

The government has said that Begum was a risk when she had her citizenship removed in February 2019, and remains a risk now.

The Security Service assessed that Begum's travel to Syria was voluntary and that her activities before and during the journey demonstrated ‘determination and commitment' to joining ISIS.

MI5 said that female recruits to ISIS were likely to have been radicalised, to have contributed to the continuance of ISIS, and may have received military training.

‘They were exposed to routine acts of extreme violence, which would be likely to have had the effect of desensitising individuals, and encouraging them to view violent terrorist activity as an acceptable and legitimate course of action.

‘ISIS was committed to perpetuating violence against those who it viewed as enemies of Islam, including the UK,' they said in a statement.