What’s the difference between Shamima Begum and Unity Mitford?

The debate sparked by Josh Baker’s BBC podcast on Shamima Begum, and her teenage flight to join Isis, has divided opinion sharply into two camps. According to one, she was a naive 15-year-old cynically groomed by hardened operatives in the most feared terror organisation in the world. No, says the other, she was a capable girl who – knowing of Isis atrocities – made a highly determined decision to join them. But can’t both things be true at once, as they are for so many young recruits to extremism? 

Listening, one is immersed in the surreal mix of mundanity and horror which defined Begum’s world after leaving home in London’s Bethnal Green. When interviewed now by Baker, she still reveals a stubborn difficulty in distributing moral weight to the expected places. Among the things she packed for Syria, she recalls, were favourite ‘candies’, because there ‘you cannot find mint chocolate, and that’s tragedy’. The word ‘tragedy’ might more aptly be applied, of course, to the fate of abducted Yazidi girls, bought and sold as Isis slaves very near to where Begum lodged in Raqqa. But on the subject of Isis atrocities she has a tendency to appear numbed, or cagey – although that may be partly to avoid either incriminating herself or attracting reprisals in the Syrian refugee camp where she is stranded after being denied re-entry to the UK.

How much did she know about Isis barbarity before she left, Baker asks. Not much, she claims, saying she didn’t see its vicious beheading videos until she reached Syria. One time, she says, a London schoolmate told her about footage of Isis putting a Jordanian pilot in a cage and burning him alive, but her former schoolfriend Sharmeena – already in Syria – apparently reassured her that was western disinformation.