It's a big week for anyone who has been waiting with baited breath for the final episode of Josh Baker’s podcast The Shamima Begum Story, about the Bethnal Green schoolgirl who left the UK to travel to Syria to join ISIS in 2015 at the age of 15.
Over the course of the series, Josh and his team have conducted numerous interviews with Shamima in Syria, to try and uncover who the now 22-year-old is today, and whether the remorse she now claims to feel for her actions is genuine. It's sparked controversary, with some claiming it 'humanises a terrorist', while others argue she was only a child when she was groomed online and indoctrinated, and she should be punished as such. Ultimately, the podcast has let listeners make up their own minds.
And now, in a final episode which didn't disappoint, they have revealed that Shamima Begum’s best friend, Sharmeena Begum (no relation), who also travelled to Syria to join ISIS, has been tracked down and interviewed undercover by the BBC. Until this moment, Sharmeena's whereabouts since she left in 2014 has been unknown. She was found having escaped from a detention camp. She's still in Syria, in hiding and using a different identity.
Speaking to the BBC journalist who posed as an Islamic State sympathiser online, Sharmeena mocked Shamima for ‘living off benefits’ and allegedly being a non-believer. She said Shamima only went to Syria because 'she just followed her friends into what became the biggest misery of her life'.
It was Sharmeena who Shamima claims inspired her to join ISIS, by presenting the terror group as a 'paradise' and claiming barbaric videos were fake. They were schoolmates in Bethnal Green when in 2014, Sharmeena suddenly went missing. She had run away to join ISIS. Shamima and her friends Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana followed two months later.
Nine years later and the BBC has found Sharmeena was illegally fundraising online for members of the IS terror group. She is described by one ex-member of the militant group as 'radical even by ISIS standards'.
Shamima lost her appeal to be brought back to the UK and tried here last month, with the special immigration appeals commission deciding a revocation of her citizenship was lawful, even though a tribunal concluded that there was ‘credible suspicion’ that she was trafficked for sexual exploitation.
It’s a shocking end to a podcast which has raised some vital questions about morality, grooming, online indoctrination, national security and the age at which we stop considering a person a child.