Shamima Begum’s 27-year-old Dutch husband, Yago Riedijk, who was a fighter for the Islamic State, has said he wants her and their newborn son Jarrah to return with him to the Netherlands.
“We should live in Holland,” said Riedijk, who is being held in a Kurdish detention centre in north-eastern Syria.
Shamima, 19, has been stripped of her UK nationality by the British home secretary. Bangladesh, too, has disowned her, so she appears to be stateless.
Riedijk has not been deprived of his Dutch nationality but he faces at least six years in prison for belonging to a terrorist organisation if he returns home — which he might find difficult to do.
Local media in Arnhem have revealed he was raised in a “lovely” middle class family before converting to Islam and leaving for Syria in October 2014 to join the IS.
Their “marriage” also may not be considered legal either in Britain or in the Netherlands because Shamima, a Bangladeshi girl who was only 15 when she ran away from her school in Bethnal Green in East London in 2015, found a partner barely 10 days after arriving in IS-controlled Syria.
Riedijk told the BBC he saw nothing wrong with marrying Shamima because it was “her choice”. Describing how he met her in a women’s centre in Raqqa, he said he was initially not interested because she was too young.
He said: “To be honest, when my friend came and said there was a girl who was interested in marriage, I wasn’t that interested because of her age, but I accepted the offer anyway.”
He added that she had seemed to be “in a good state of mind”.
Riedijk insisted: “It was her own choice. She asked to look for a partner for her, and I was invited.”
He conceded “she was very young, maybe it would have been better for her to wait a bit”, before adding, “But she didn’t, she chose to get married and I chose to marry her.”
The IS fighter told the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville that he was imprisoned in Raqqa and tortured after the extremists accused him of being a Dutch spy. He admitted fighting for the IS but said he later rejected its ideology and had tried to leave the group.
Riedijk also said he attended the stoning of a woman for “fornication”, saw piles of dead bodies in the city and lost an infant daughter to malnutrition. Another son also did not survive.
Riedijk and Shamima escaped the town of Baghouz, the terror group’s last territory in eastern Syria, as the self-styled “caliphate” crumbled. Riedijk surrendered to a group of Syrian fighters, and Shamima ended up among 39,000 people in the al-Hol refugee camp in northern Syria.
She has now moved to the Al-Roj refugee base nearer the Iraqi border, apparently because of threats from other extremist brides.
However, Kurdish security sources denied claims from Shamima’s lawyer that this was because of safety fears after reports that IS hardliners, angered by her high profile and uncovered face in interviews with the media, had put a bounty on her head.Officials insisted that Shamima was moved to make space for a surge in IS fighters and their families pouring into al-Hol from Baghouz.
