Source: The Guardian
“I was thinking about the children’s futures. Was he part of it? Will he come back? All these things go through your mind. I was seeing on the news at this point that Isis was going from bad to worse … So I decided that I was going to try and speak some sense into him.” Begum said she ended up in a safehouse before being reunited with al-Harith. “You’ve got hundreds of families living in one hall, sharing perhaps one or two bathrooms between them, one or two kitchens between them,” she said. “Children crying, children were sick.
“There was a gangster kind of mentality among single women there. Violent talk – talking about war, killing. They would sit together and huddle around their laptops and watch Isis videos together and discuss them and everything. It was just not my cup of tea.
“It was worse than I expected. I didn’t expect it to be so overcrowded for them to just lumber so many women and children together just for the sake of them being there, waiting for their husbands, waiting for properties to live in.”
She described finally realising that he would neither leave with her nor help her to get away. She turned instead to people smugglers, who took her to Aleppo, where she was held captive along with her children.
Relatives of al-Harith did not respond to the Guardian on Tuesday.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “The UK has advised for some time.
Categories: Europe, Europe and Australia, UK