SHAMIMA Begum was a child when she was groomed online, lured to Syria and married off to a jihadist fighter. She has since witnessed scenes that would leave the most hardened middle-aged adults in a state of trauma and has watched two children die from malnutrition.

Her third child, just a few days old, is destined to meet the same fate if our Home Secretary Sajid Javid has his way, and the short, tormented life of Shamima Begum will likely soon be over. Because that’s the stark alternative to bringing her back home to Britain. Even an anonymous teenager with a newborn child would be in serious danger where she is right now. A veteran foreign correspondent describes the al-Hawl refugee camp as a “living hell for the cold and hungry”, a “village of the damned” and a “black hole of despair”.

READ MORE: Unpalatable as it seems, justice must prevail – even when it comes to Daesh

Hemmed in by barbed wire, tens of thousands of malnourished women and children live in primitive conditions near open sewers. Disease is rampant and medicines non-existent. Almost every day, at least one baby or infant dies in its mother’s arms from cold and malnutrition.

“Let her rot!” has been the chant from right-wing politicians and journalists about Begum– and from much of the wider public too, judging by the newspaper comments, columns and social media feeds. Others try to be more measured in their determination to wash their hands of her by expressing concern that she would be a danger to the British public if she was allowed to come back home.

Do either of these groups have a point? The first is fuelled by vengeful hatred. “She’s made her bed, and she now must lie in it,” wrote one columnist. These are often the same people who like to preach the virtues of British civilisation. The people who like to portray Brits as paragons of tolerance and fair-mindedness, in contrast to the fanatical foreigners of Asia and the Middle East. The people who, in the name of free speech, defend the rights of neo-Nazis to parade our streets. The people who, confronted with a real life-and-death moral dilemma start to look more like a 17th-century witch-burning mob than enlightened citizens of the 21st century. In case there’s any misunderstanding of my view, I’ll spell it out. Isis/Daesh is an ugly, vicious organisation, psychopathic in its methods and medieval in its ideology. But this death cult did not fall from a clear blue sky. It is a product of conditions created by politicians in Washington DC and London. Many of us who marched against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq warned mass slaughter of civilian populations would turn the world into a more dangerous place.

The only mistake we made was to underestimate the scale of the living nightmare that would unfold. A report published last year by the Ivy League Brown University revealed that the War on Terror declared by George W Bush and Tony Blair has so far killed more than half-a-million people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone during its 17 years. When you add indirect deaths, that figure rises to well over a million. And that’s before we start on the tens of millions who have been displaced from their homes.

Lest we forget, the so-called “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”, also known as Isis and Daesh, was born out of the Iraq War. Does anyone imagine that if a million Christians in Europe had died at the hands of Islamic military superpowers over the past 17 years, and tens of millions made homeless, that would not have spawned the rise of ultra-violent Christian fundamentalist terror groups?

Does that sober thought justify the actions of a naive teenager? Of course not. But it does underline the fact there are many others, some of them still powerful public figures strutting the international stage, who bear far more responsibility for the sickening violence tearing Syria apart than a teenage girl who, as far as we know, has never fired a single bullet nor harmed a hair on anyone’s head. Like those right at the top, who started the War on Terror and ordered the burning alive of whole towns full of innocent civilians in a series of brutal bombing campaigns, Shamima Begum has so far shown no remorse. And that’s what seems to have upset a lot of people.

But none of us knows the context of this interview, which was spur-of-the moment rather than rearranged according than to the journalist from The Times who met her. Was she frightened to reveal her true feelings? Quite possibly – after all she is trapped in a refugee camp where the mass of residents are supporters of Isis/Daesh. I suspect that if the worldwide headlines had reported her denunciation of Islamic extremism, she would be an instant target for execution.

And is she traumatised? Given what we know of her life these past three years, of course she is – and not in the loose way the word tends to be used these days to describe any sense of shock or horror. People who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder build emotional walls around themselves. The symptoms include disconnection from reality, blankness and numbing of all feelings. These are coping mechanisms that victims use to shut out an unbearable reality.

Would Shamima Begum pose a threat to national security if she could return to the UK? No-one knows for sure whether or not she could be fully rehabilitated. But these are decisions that can be made by the appropriate professionals and processes. And yes, she is entitled to the same due process as everyone else. It scares me how quickly some people can decide that human rights can be discarded for humans we don’t like.

One question that really needs to be asked is whether a state that spends £37bn a year on defence and boasts some of most sophisticated surveillance systems and intelligence services in the world, is frightened of being outwitted by a traumatised teenager barely out of childhood. Seriously? What a powerful message that would send to would-be terrorists.