The Return: Life After Isis, review: Shamima Begum has her say

According to its director, The Return: Life After Isis (Sky Documentaries) was a film “that challenges the viewer to listen without judging”. Impossible, I’m afraid.

Director Alba Sotorra Clua spent two years filming women in the Roj detention camp in north-east Syria. We are all familiar with the story of the wretched Shamima Begum, the east London schoolgirl who ran away at 15 to join the so-called Islamic State. She was one of the subjects here, alongside others from Canada, the Netherlands, the US and Germany. All were in limbo, their governments having washed their hands of them.

They spoke of being brainwashed, of unhappy home lives, of being lured by propaganda videos asking them to help their fellow Muslims. Shamima said she saw images of injured children that made her sick to her stomach. She told the film-makers she had been “really naive”.

The film let Shamima and the others tell their stories without interruption. Occasionally there were pointers to alternative versions of events. Hoda Muthana was a sweet-faced young American, a diplomat’s daughter who said her hopes of pursuing a business career were dashed by her family’s insistence on an arranged marriage. So far, so sympathetic. Then the film flashed up examples of the Twitter messages she posted, urging Muslims to commit mass murder: “Go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive over them. Kill them.”

Nor were they all silly girls. Canadian Kimberly Polman was a middle-aged empty nester who had joined Isil after meeting a man online. As with all of the women, there was little to no acknowledgement of the horrors that Isil had inflicted. In conversation with a Kurdish women’s rights activist whose compassion was humbling, Polman complained: “I shouldn’t be here at all. I never even had a parking ticket back in my own country.”

Clua made brief mention of Isil crimes – the execution of journalist Jim Foley, the Manchester Arena bombing – yet failed to confront any of the women with it. And it was telling that they became disillusioned with Isil only when life turned out to be terrible for them personally. The film managed to be sympathetic and damning at the same time.

What the film did convey though, was that there are young children living in Roj in the most desperate conditions. The saddest story here was not the women’s tales of woe but that starving children had been reduced to eating grass during the final days of Isil, but had been told that a feast awaited them in heaven. When they were offered a meal on arrival at this hellish camp, they asked their mothers if they had reached paradise.