Shamima Begum is no victim – and I should know

I am a 56-year-old dad of four. I live with my wife and dog in Surrey, where I run a successful building firm. But I also know Shamima Begum, who this week lost her appeal to have her citizenship reinstated, perhaps better than anyone else in Britain – apart from her family. I’ve visited her six times, travelling across thousands of miles and warzones to meet the jihadi bride.

That’s because I’m one of the world’s foremost extreme tourists. My holidays have taken me to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, North Korea and Chernobyl. I have infiltrated the KKK, was the first westerner to visit the Black Hawk Down crash site in Mogadishu and have embedded myself with Kurdish militias fighting Isis.

In June 2021, I went to meet Shamima in the al-Roj prison camp in Syria. Over the next year, we formed a strong friendship. We would regularly swap texts and she occasionally asked me to bring her things from back home in Britain, including clothes from Primark. She’s a size zero.

When I first met her she was refusing to speak to journalists because she had been stripped of her citizenship after a notorious interview; in 2019, she told the Times that seeing decapitated heads in bins ‘didn’t faze’ her. I’m a working-class boy and there was part of me that wanted to see if I could speak to Shamima. All of the Oxbridge journalists had tried and failed. (I’ve got nothing against Oxbridge, I just wanted to see if I could get where they couldn’t, and I did.)

It’s probably my background that helped us bond; during our first chat, we talked about the TV series Friends. If I’m honest, sitting in front of this petite young woman, I felt sorry for her. She reminded me of my daughter.