Yago Riedijk, who is a Kurdish detention center in Syria, told the BBC that he, his wife and their newborn son “should live in Holland,” but he is still on a terrorism watch list.
LONDON — The Dutch husband of Shamima Begum, the teenager who fled Britain to join the Islamic State, has told British news outlets that he wants to return to the Netherlands with his wife and their newborn son.
“We should live in Holland,” Ms. Begum’s husband, Yago Riedijk, 27, told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Sunday. He admitted to fighting for the Islamic State, but said he has since rejected the group.
He is being held at a Kurdish detention center in northeastern Syria. Ms. Begum, 19, was recently in the Al Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria, but her family’s lawyer said she was forced to move after receiving threats.
Mr. Riedijk married Ms. Begum days after she arrived in Syria, when he was 23 and she was 15. They have since had three children, two of whom have died. The third was born last month in the refugee camp, after the couple fled the last remaining Islamic State stronghold in Syria.
Mr. Riedijik defended their union.
“To be honest, when my friend came and said there was a girl who was interested in marriage, I wasn’t that interested because of her age, but I accepted the offer anyway,” he said.
Then the 23-year-old son of a railway engineer, he had grown up in a well-to-do suburb of Arnhem, in the eastern part of the Netherlands.
