An Islamic State bride asks to come home

LONDON - In February 2015, a grainy still photo from closed-circuit TV footage that became familiar to almost everyone in Britain showed a slightly built London schoolgirl stepping through the narrow gate of an airport security scanner.

It might as well have been the portal to another world.

With downcast eyes, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and the slightly gawky posture of the 15-year-old she was, Shamima Begum, together with two teenage girlfriends, was about to board a flight from London's Gatwick Airport to Istanbul, Turkey, a journey that would take them into the heart of the "caliphate" of Islamic State.

Now Begum has surfaced at a squalid refugee camp in northern Syria - seemingly unrepentant, heavily pregnant with her fighter husband's child, and voicing a desire to return to Britain.

"All I want to do is come home," Begum told Anthony Loyd, a famed war correspondent for the