‘I married Shamima Begum’: ISIS bride’s husband speaks from his jail cell

Shamima Begum‘s jihadi husband has spoken from his prison cell about the moment he married the underage schoolgirl. 

Yago Reidijk was a 23-year-old ISIS fighter when he wed the 15-year-old Londoner in Raqqa after they had spent 10 minutes speaking together to ‘see if we clicked’. 

The Dutch convert, who is behind bars in Syria, said that before the ceremony Begum gave him a list of ‘weird’ questions and requests, including being able to visit friends.  

‘I just wanted a partner who I could find some rest with and who could take care of me,’ he told the BBC documentary The Shamima Begum Story. ‘I asked if she knew how to cook and she said yes. 

‘Our meetings was 10 minutes max. We decided we wanted to try it. We don’t have such a thing as dating or going out and having a meal together. You get to know each other a bit and then if you click you decide to take this step.’

Begum – who’s also been given a 10-part BBC podcast – recalled feeling ‘shy’ at their initial meeting but added: ‘It was exciting for me because I’d never been in a relationship. 

‘My entire life I’d been surrounded by women so being with a man was a new concept to me. 

‘It was kind of scary too because this was a man I’d have to spend my life with for however long we were alive.’

Asked what she wanted from the relationship, Begum said: ‘I to be loved because I felt like I was not loved by anyone.’ 

In the disturbing interview, dead-eyed Reidijk recalled how he took the schoolgirl to the park after they were married by an ISIS judge. 

Asked what she was like, he said: ‘She was very young when she came. She didn’t have a lot of life experiences. They wasn’t much of a person to get to know’

‘Most of her life experiences she has the day are the experiences she had in the Islamic State as I got to know her. She was basically an empty paper. 

‘She had got a little bit of understanding about how the married life worked, so that helped her out a lot. 

‘Respecting of the husband, trying to please the husband and obedience.’ 

Challenged by broadcaster Joshua Baker about the fact that Begum was only 15, he replied: ‘She was underage, yeah. 

‘You might not agree with it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right.’ 

Asked about whether she was comfortable marrying an ISIS fighter, Begum said:  ‘Before I married him I guess he was. I mean I thought he was doing the right thing. I thought he was fighting for his religion and the state.’ 

She went on to say that Reidijk was ‘nice’ and ‘funny’ at first but went on to become ‘abusive’.  

Begum had three children by Riedijk, two of whom died of disease or malnutrition, and a third, born after her capture by Western-backed forces, died of pneumonia. 

Begum’s lawyers told an appeal against her citizenship deprivation last year that there was ‘overwhelming’ evidence she was groomed and trafficked by ISIS for the purpose of ‘sexual exploitation and marriage to an adult male.’ 

‘In doing so, she was following a well-known pattern by which ISIS cynically recruited and groomed female children, as young as 14, so that they could be offered as wives to adult men,’ Nick Squires, KC, told the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC).

ISIS deliberately recruited underage girls for sexual exploitation and child marriage because they were needed for the ‘bearing of children, which was an important feature of its state-building project,’ he said.

Riedijk had fought in the bloody battle for Kobane at the end of 2014, against the Kurdish forces who now hold him, and was injured during the fighting.

‘It was known to be a massacre,’ he said in an earlier interview last year. ‘I don’t know how to describe it. Loads and loads of Islamic State fighters died there.’

Some members of his ISIS battalion – called Saif al-Dawla (Sword of ISIS) – refused to go and were thrown in jail, he added.