So this girl is pregnant, and she's in a war zone. She's running for her life, and there's gunfire and the sounds of bombs all around her, and all she wants to do is get home safely. So the girl—let's call her Sham—she's 15, she lives at home with her parents in London, and she's a good student.
But for some reason, Sham feels like she isn't loved. Then one day, she gets a message from a friend overseas, and the friend is like, "It's too bad you live in the UK, 'cause it's Paradise here in Syria, in ISIS territory. " Sham, she’s heard about ISIS before; she’s heard a lot of bad things, but after weeks of chatting back and forth with her friend, Sham is now convinced she can find the love that her life is missing if she moves to Syria and into ISIS territory.
Soon enough, Sham decides that's what she's going to do, and she convinces two of her London friends to go with her. These two girls are Amira and Kadiza. So Sham packs her bags, tells her parents that she's going to study, and that they'll be back in a few hours.
Then, she, Amira, and Kadiza sneak away to the airport and take a flight to Istanbul, Turkey. There, they meet up with a smuggler at a bus station. The smuggler is a guy who specializes in getting people into ISIS territory, so he takes them and guides them through a smuggling route that goes about 700 miles across Turkey and into Syria.
Meanwhile, back in England, Sham's parents notice she’s missing, and then word gets out that three teenage girls left London to go join ISIS. This becomes a huge media story—an international hunt for three young girls believed to be on their way to join ISIS—but no one can find them because Sham, Amira, and Kadiza are now in Syria and they are officially off the grid. Now, at this point in ISIS territory, Sham would likely be forced to wear a full burka, but for the purpose of storytelling, I'm not going to put her in that, 'cause then you won't recognize her in the pictures.
So anyway, as soon as the girls get to ISIS territory, they’re immediately expected to start a new domesticated life, and after only being there for ten days, 15-year-old Sham is married off to an ISIS fighter, a 23-year-old man whom we'll just call Husband. Sham is taught to be obedient to Husband and to do whatever he asks. Surprisingly, Sham and her new terrorist husband get along well enough; sometimes he even grants her permission to go out and see her friends, so that's nice of him.
But after only ten days together, Husband comes home one day, and he's like, "I have to go to prison," because he's being accused by ISIS of being a spy. So ISIS takes him away and puts him in prison, and they torture him. To make it worse for Sham, her friend Kadiza unfortunately dies in a bombing.
So Sham is at home all alone for seven months while ISIS's Husband is being tortured in an ISIS prison. But then I guess they realize he's not a spy, so ISIS releases him and returns him home. But then one day—boom!
—Sham gets pregnant, and she has a baby daughter. Now suddenly, she starts feeling some of that love she's been missing in her life. Shortly after her daughter’s born—boom!
—Sham gets pregnant again, and this time she has a baby son. Awesome! Double the love!
But then, eight months later, unfortunately, baby son gets sick, so she takes him to an ISIS hospital, but they have no meds and not enough staff, so her son doesn't get the treatment he needs, and he dies. It gets worse: her daughter, who's now one year and nine months old, also gets sick and dies. On top of all that, her husband has turned out to be abusive—shocker!
—but Sham still has to do whatever he says because those are the rules. And so—boom! —she gets pregnant again.
Then at some point, Amira goes missing, and since they live in an active war zone, she’s presumed to be dead too. But, crazy enough, around this time, ISIS actually starts to collapse, and Kurdish forces start taking over ISIS territory. So with all this conflict going on, pregnant Sham tries to flee, and she ends up getting separated from her husband and captured by the Kurdish forces.
Once captured, they take her to a refugee camp in northern Syria. Now she’s 19 years old, nine months pregnant, living in this refugee camp with no friends and no husband. But at that camp, she meets a journalist, and they get to talking.
Sham tells this journalist that she’s one of the girls from the news, one of the girls who left London to go join ISIS, and she also tells him, like, "Yeah, I'm done here. I'd like to go back to London now. " So the journalist starts reporting on her, and word gets out that they finally located this famous missing girl from the news.
This story blows up—everyone's talking about it—and Sham wants to come home, but the British government is like, "Eh, not so fast," and they strip her of her British citizenship, mostly because she, you know, joined a terrorist organization. But this is a big news story, and Sham has people on her side, including lawyers. Her lawyers fight the decision and appeal it, arguing that Sham was actually a victim of human trafficking.
During this whole fight, Sham is still in the refugee camp, and she gives birth to her third kid, a son. But unfortunately. .
. Quickly, the son ends up dying of pneumonia, and the whole appeals process about her citizenship takes years. But in the end, the court unanimously upholds the removal of Shams' UK citizenship, and they don't let her back into the country.
To this day, at 24 years old, Shams is still living in Syria, still living in the refugee camp. So, shout out to Syria, I guess.
