Samia Hussein (pictured), 25, from Southall, west London, revealed her arm was blown off
British ISIS bride Samia Hussein has revealed an explosion tore off her arm and one of her breasts when coalition forces launched an airstrike on a jihadist weapon store near her home.
The 25-year-old from Southall, west London, blamed ISIS for her injuries. She said the caliphate put women and children at risk by storing supplies next to houses filled with families.
Hussein, who is now being held in the Kurdish-run al-Hol prisoner camp in north east Syria, had walked into her house as the air strike detonated nearby.
She said she ‘saw orange’ but didn’t realise she had been hurt.
In her first interview she told documentary filmmaker Alan Duncan: ‘I tried to run. But then I realised that my arm was cut off, my chest was split open and my leg was broken – the whole bone came out.’
A six-month-old baby and a pensioner were killed in the blast, according to Hussein. She was left bed-ridden for seven months and came close to having her leg amputated.
The former student was discovered alongside other UK citizens when the jihadists’ last-remaining stronghold of Baghouz fell in March last year.
Mr Hussein said the militant group thought the coalition wouldn’t want to risk bombing children, and when bombs killed families it was used as propaganda.
‘To them this is good. They can take a recording of this and publicise it in their propaganda saying “look, the coalition has killed women and children”,’ she said.
Hussein said she was groomed and radicalised online before she decided to travel to Syria via Turkey.
She said the propaganda videos she watched as a teenager were ‘fantasy’ and it was not worth travelling to the region.
Hussein, who is now being held in the Kurdish-run al-Hol prisoner camp (pictured) in north east Syria, had walked into her house as the bomb detonated nearby. She said she ‘saw orange’ but didn’t realise she had been hurt
She said there were no guards at the border and it was ‘really easy’.
MI5 officials visited Hussein’s friends’ homes to warn them about online grooming, but didn’t confiscate any passports, she said.
Now she wants to be allowed back into Britain where she can go through a trial.
She said: ‘I’m alive, half of me survived anyway. We were groomed online. I never knew coming to Syria was a crime.’
Hussein described conditions with ISIS as ‘inhumane’ with people being held in cages for misdemeanours like smoking or not attending prayers.
Children look through a chain linked fence at al-Hol displacement camp in Hasaka governorate, Syria, on March 8, 2019
Mr Duncan, a former British Army soldier who fought against ISIS with the Kurds, has interviewed dozens of extremists.
He slammed Turkey for letting an estimated 1,500 British teenagers into Syria during the height of the civil war in 2015.
His documentary with television firm Atlantic Productions is set to air in the UK and US in 2021.
ISIS bride Shamima Begum (pictured at a refugee camp in Syria earlier this year) had her British nationality revoked
It comes a year after Hussein’s family said that she was tricked into thinking she’d be helping refugees as they pleaded with the UK Government to bring her home.
A close relative said her family were worried about her health, telling The Telegraph she feared she’d never be let back into the UK.
‘We need the Government to help her,’ she said. ‘She’s British, she was born here and has a British passport and we want her to come back to this country.’
The camp also holds Shamima Begum, who left Bethnal Green in East London to join Islamic State when she was 15.
The family of Hussein said she was duped to stop studying and go to a camp in 2015 while living in Kenya.
Five years ago, she left the UK to study A-Levels in Nairobi and hoped to head to the capital’s United States International University – Africa to complete a degree.
Her family says that she was groomed and ‘brainwashed’ into believing she’d be helping ‘children in need’ but found herself trapped in the Caliphate.
A relative told the paper that somebody influenced her in Nairobi, telling her that she’d be carrying out aid work.
She disappeared in autumn 2015 and one week later sent a text to her mother, Luul Hussein Tarambi, saying she was being held against her will and needed to get out.
In her text she told them that she ‘had been brainwashed and said she needed help’, the relative said.
Pictured: The camp where Hussein is living now alongside Shamima Begum from Bethnal Green, East London
Three-and-a-half years later Hussein’s family received a phone call from her while she was in the refugee camp.
Her relative claims that she told them over a borrowed phone that Islamic State had kidnapped her and held her hostage. The relative says that Hussein is ‘not loyal’ to the terror group and ‘wants nothing to do with them at all’.
It was during that call on an apparently borrowed phone that she revealed her injuries from the air strike.
She did not offer too many details about her situation for fear that the call was being monitored, the relative said, adding that Hussein was scared of people in the camp who are still loyal to the terrorists.
One of her sisters, Asha Hussein, described her sibling as a ‘bright girl’ who was ‘really happy’.
She said that her sister wanted to become a journalist and that there was no sign of Samia being radicalised before she disappeared.