A British schoolgirl who ran away to join Isil has appealed for public “sympathy” following the birth of her son, as a row develops over whether she should be allowed to return to the UK.

Shamima Begum (19) went to Syria in 2015 and was discovered there in a refugee camp last week, heavily pregnant and insisting she wanted to return to the UK.

The birth of her child over the weekend prompted calls for the baby to be subject to care proceedings should Ms Begum return from Syria, as it emerged that the Family Division of the UK High Court had presided over cases involving at least 150 children deemed at risk of radicalisation in the last five years.

In an interview with Sky News recorded yesterday at the Kurdish-controlled camp she fled to from the last pocket of Isil-controlled territory, Ms Begum said there was “no evidence” she had done anything wrong and she could not see “any reason” why her child should be taken from her when she had simply been living as a housewife.

Speaking just hours after giving birth, her newborn baby at her side, she said she had no regrets about fleeing the family home in Bethnal Green, east London, to support Isil, claiming the experience had made her “stronger, tougher”.

She said she could see a future for herself and her son, whom she has named Jarah after one of the two children she lost to malnutrition and disease in the last three months.

“If the UK are willing to take me back and help me start a new life again and try and move on from everything that’s happened in the last four years,” she said. “I wouldn’t have found someone like my husband [Yago Riedijk (26), a Muslim convert from the Netherlands] in the UK. I had my kids, I had a good time there.”

Her other children, Jarah and Surayah, a daughter, died aged 18 months and nine months.

Asked how she felt about the debate over whether she should be allowed to return home, she said: “I feel a lot of people should have sympathy for me, for everything I’ve been through. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I left, I just was hoping that maybe for the sake of me and my child they let me come back. I can’t live in this camp forever. It’s not really possible.”

In the interview, Ms Begum apologised for the first time to her family for running away. She said she was attracted to Isil by videos that she had seen online, which she said showed “how they’ll take care of you”.

She said she knew that the group carried out beheadings, but that she “was OK with it at first. I started becoming religious just before I left and from what I heard Islamically that is all allowed”.

“At first it was nice,” she said of life in Isil. “It was how they showed it in the videos, you know, you come, make a family together, but then things got harder.

“We had to keep moving and moving. The situation got fraught. I’m still in that mentality of planes over my head, emergency backpacks, starving… it would be a big shock to go back to the UK.” (© Daily Telegraph London)

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