FORMER Brit ISIS bride Shamima Begum has been slammed for faking remorse as her controversial podcast has sparked fury.
The BBC has faced huge backlash for the ten-part podcast where the 23-year-old opens up about joining the ruthless terrorist group.
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Begum who currently lives in the Al-Roj prison camp, speaks about travelling to Syria to join the bloodthirsty jihadis in the “I’m Not a Monster” podcast.
The 23-year-old has consistently claimed she was groomed when she was 15, before being trafficked for sexual exploitation by the terror group in 2015.
The podcast aired as she awaits a ruling on her appeal against the Home Office’s decision to remove her British citizenship, expected by March.
She admits the public sees her “as a danger” after she joined the terror group but insists she is “so much more than ISIS.”
But journalist and filmmaker Andrew Drury who met Begum seven times over the course of a year doubts her show of remorse is genuine.
Despite initially believing she was a trafficking victim, he described her as manipulative” and said she has “no remorse.”
He told the Times: “She sees herself as a victim now but she told me quite clearly it was her choice to go [to Syria] and she went of her own free will.
“She is a narcissist. She wants to be a somebody. Now she sees herself as a celebrity.
“Being part of Isis meant she was a somebody and now she’s a somebody again.”
He also said that she once asked for a copy of Guantanamo Diary, a book by Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s book about his time in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years without charge.
In his book Trip Hazard, Drury said Begum is trying to “create a character,” noting that when they first met she did not mention “being trafficked or groomed.”
Drury added he lost sympathy for her when she said she was “over” the death of her three children.
And journalist Richard Ashmore, who met Begum in Syria last year, said “she is the iconic Isis bride of Britain” before adding she had even “thrown a tantrum” when he interviewed another woman at the camp.
Meanwhile, Begum’s podcast has already sparked outrage with critics accusing the BBC of giving a platform to someone who openly accepts she joined a terrorist organisation.
Tory MP Giles Watling,from the Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee, questioned whether we should “give these people airtime”.
In response to viewers’ complaints who branded the podcast “appalling”, the podcast series editor Jonathan Aspinwall, told Newswatch on Friday they “never take [Shamima’s] account as necessarily the truth” adding their job is to “find out exactly what happened.”
A BBC spokesperson previously said: “This is not a platform for Shamima Begum to give her unchallenged story.
“This is a robust, public interest investigation in which Josh Baker has forensically examined who she really is and what she really did.
“We’d also encourage people to listen to the podcast and make up their own mind.”
In the podcast, Begum talks about being given detailed instructions by ISIS including how to avoid detection during the journey.
She says she stuffed her suitcase with her favourite chocolate because she feared she wouldn’t be able to get hold of any once she was in the Middle East.
The former schoolgirl from Bethnal Green, east London, wed an ISIS fighter after travelling to Syria and had three children, who have all since died.
After the collapse of the evil regime, she ended up in a refugee camp which she called “worse than a prison.”
In 2019, was stripped of her UK citizenship by Home Secretary at the time Sajid Javi.
She has since launched a fresh attempt to have her citizenship restored with her lawyers telling the court she was “cynically recruited and groomed.”
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