Los Angeles (AFP)
"My name is Shamima. I'm from the UK. I'm 19," she chuckles nervously, in the middle of a room full of other young women and restless babies.
One might think of an ordinary support group for young isolated mothers, but Shamima is one of the "jihadist wives" who left for Syria to join the territories controlled at the time by the Islamic State (IS) organization and whose fate is now causing controversy and unease in their countries of origin.
Leaving Great Britain when she was only 15 years old, Shamima Begum was stripped of her nationality and British justice refused her return to the country.
She testifies, with other wives of jihadists, in the documentary "The Return: Life After Isis" presented Wednesday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
Spanish director Alba Sotorra has been granted privileged access to Shamima and other Western women detained since 2019 in the Roj camp, controlled by the coalition of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
"I would like to say to people in the UK: give me a second chance because I was still young when I left," the young woman says in the film.
“I just want them to put aside anything they've heard about me in the media,” she adds.
Shamima Begum had left in 2015 with two friends the United Kingdom, where she was born and raised, for Syria.
There, she married an IS jihadist of Dutch origin, eight years her senior.
After fleeing the fighting, she found herself in a camp where she gave birth to a baby, who died a few weeks after birth.
Her first two children, born in Syria, also died.
- Propaganda -
She was discovered in February 2019 in the camp by British journalists while she was pregnant and had then expressed no remorse over her life with ISIS, which shocked public opinion.
Shamima Begum and her comrades give a very different image in Alba Sotorra's documentary, which follows "workshops" during which young women write a letter to those, often naive, that they were when they left for Syria.
"We knew that Syria was a war zone and I went there anyway with my children; when I think about it I don't even understand how I could have done that," says a Westerner.
Shamima Begum explains for her part that she felt like a "foreigner" in London and that she wanted to "help the Syrians".
She assures that when she arrived there, she quickly realized that the IS "was trapping people" to swell its ranks, and amplify its propaganda.
It was by gaining the trust of Kurdish fighters during a previous film that Alba Sotorra was able to have the doors of Roj camp opened, where she met the detainees.
"I will never be able to understand how a Western woman can make the decision to drop everything to join an organization that perpetrates atrocities such as those of the IS," the director told AFP.
"But now I understand how you can make a mistake," she continues.
- "I lived in fear" -
When she arrived in March 2019, the young women had just left the combat zones and were "blocked ... they didn't think, didn't feel anything".
"Shamima was a block of ice when I met her. She lost a child when I was there ... it took her a while to be able to cry", recalls the director, who puts it down to 'a reflex of "survival".
Alba Sotorra also cites the presence in the camp of a nucleus, "small but very powerful", of "more radicalized women" who remain devoted to the Islamic State and exert pressure on the other detainees.
In the film, Shamima Begum claims that she "had no choice but to say certain things" to the journalists who found her, "because I lived in fear that these women would come to my tent for me. kill me and my baby. "
We risk never knowing exactly what these women knew about the rapes, torture, and massacres committed by ISIS.
Shamima Begum swears to have ignored all of these crimes and denies having taken any part in them.
"I never even had a parking fine ... I never hurt anyone, I never killed anyone, I didn't do anything", protests another inmate , Kimberly Polman, 40-year-old Canadian.
"Maybe your husband killed my cousin," retorts a Kurdish woman skeptically.
For Alba Sotorra, allowing the return of these women to their country could be useful to prevent future generations from making the same mistakes.
"It took them a while to realize that they had some responsibility in their choice. They can't just think + OK, I'm sorry, I'm going back, as if nothing had happened + (.. .) We must accept the consequences, "said the director.
© 2021 AFP