There, she found herself living in Raqqa, the Syrian capital of the Islamic State caliphate, where she was “married’’ to a Sydney man seven years older than her, and had her first baby at the age of 16.

Now 22, she has four children, and has spent the past three years detained in the prison camps housing Islamic State families in the desert in northeastern Syria.

She tries to describe a future for her family, and tells how she struggled to homeschool her children in a tent, given she had barely finished Year 9 in high school before she was taken from Australia.

“It’s actually really hard,’’ she tells The Weekend Australian in an interview on a 44C day inside the al-Roj camp in Kurdish-controlled Syria, near the Iraqi border.

“Sometimes I feel like time has stopped. Living in a 4 x 4 tent and your child waking up in the night telling you he can’t breathe from the heat, that’s actually really hard.

“And I can’t really let them outside because this is the only sort of shade we have,’’ she says, gesturing to the metre or so of shade cast by the cement wall of a tiny communal kitchen.

The Syria Question

‘Give them a childhood’: mum

Pressure is mounting on the Albanese government to deal with the problem it inherited from the Coalition and repatriate Australian citizens from Syria.

‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I want to come back’

An Australian member of Islamic State locked up in a Syrian prison is begging for forgiveness from his parents and wants to come home, saying he poses no threat.

ISIS families stranded by domestic laws

Government is not legally required to bring ISIS families home, but should do so to meet international obligations, law expert says

Aid chief proves Syria trip can be done

For years, the previous government said it was too dangerous to extract women and children. Save the Children’s Australian chief Mat Tinkler set out to dismiss that claim.

Roll call of the terror-linked prisoners

Australian men are among ISIS-linked prisoners in Syria.

Mystery over death of jailed Aussie teen

Officials and family seek answers over how Sydney teen Yusuf Zahab lost his life in the Syrian prison after an Islamic State attempted jailbreak.

Australian law does not require we bring Syria families home

Rather than safeguarding their rights, our legal system arms our government with extraordinary powers to prevent citizens from returning.

Aussie teen in Syrian prison feared killed

A 17-year-old Australian boy detained for three years without charge in a men’s prison in Syria is believed to have been killed after Islamic State attacked the jail trying to free their fighters.

Jihadi brides’ return ‘risky but ethical’

Repatriating Islamic State families undeniably brings security and legal challenges, but should be done for ethical and national security reasons, a leading counter-terrorism expert says.

Two of the saddest little girls you’ll meet

For the last seven years, Assya and Maysa Assaad have lived either under the rule of IS, or locked in a camp in the desert. All they want to do is go to school.

‘I go to sleep fearing they will be taken from me’

Mariam Raad wants stability and an education for her children, and a job for herself. But as a widow with four children living in a prison camp, her future is precarious.

Repatriated kids live quietly in community

The families of two dead IS fighters repatriated from Syria by the Australian government have been living in the community for several years.

Childhood lost: ‘Sometimes I feel like time has stopped’

Shayma Assaad had barely finished Year Nine in Sydney when she was taken to Syria, married off and impregnated. Hers is one of the most disturbing stories of all the Australian women trapped in al-Roj camp.

No exit and no hope in ‘torture’ camps

‘This is not a holiday camp, it’s not a refugee camp, it’s not a place where the basic needs of human beings are met in any way.’

Time to decide what becomes of those left behind

There’s little sympathy in Australia for fellow citizens trapped in Syrian camps. Instead, there’s a dangerous ignorance of the truth.

Jail swap sent Aussie mum, baby back to Islamic State

Sydney woman Nesrine Zahab has revealed how she fled ISIS while pregnant, only to be returned to the extremist group with her newborn baby in a prisoner swap.

Islamic fate: the lost heirs of Aussie terror

Pressure is mounting on the PM to repatriate Australian women and children held in camps for Islamic State families in Syria, amid fears their indefinite detention is leading to a national security disaster.

The plight of Shayma Assaad is one of the most troubling of the group of women and children held in al-Roj camp. She was just a child herself when she was taken to Syria, and now has four children under seven: sons Alaa, 6, Dawood, 5, Umayr, 4, and little Mariam, 3, who was born in the camp and has never taken a step outside her wire compound.

Her husband, former Sydney tradie Mohammed Noor Masri, is in prison several hours away in Hasakah, where he has been held incommunicado for more than three years.

Her mother Bessima and little sisters Assya, 15, and Maysa, 12, are in the tent next door. All were taken into custody by the Syrian Democratic Forces at Baghouz in March 2019.

Her father Ahmad Assaad is in prison near Hasakah. He has previously claimed he only took the family to Syria in an effort to rescue two of his sons, and that they inadvertently became “stuck’’ in Islamic State territory.

Ms Assaad, 151cm tall, emotional and in tears as she speaks, told how her youngest child, three-year-old daughter Mariam, was born at the notoriously dangerous al-Hol camp, near Hasakah.

“Mariam was born in the camp, in Hol. She was actually born in a tent, not a hospital. She was born two o’clock in the morning in a tent with no doctor support at all,’’ Ms Assaad said.

“We had a neighbour, she had a bit of experience with delivering children, she was our only hope. We had to actually ask her for help so she came to my rescue.’’

The Australian families were moved to the safer al-Roj camp two years ago, in the Syrian oilfields in a remote part of the country close to the Iraqi border.

In winter it freezes and snow falls on their tent, which is heated with a kerosene heater. In summer, it routinely hits more than 45C during the day.

“It’s actually a risk for them to stay in the tent because fires are caused by electricity,’’ Ms Assaad said of her children.

“It is also a risk of them going out in the sun and burning. As you can see, my daughter’s turned black from the sun. The days here are actually really long, hard. You have to struggle for water. Every 48 tents there’s a fence, as you can see. Schooling is hard as well because children get scared to go to school.”

The Australians largely keep their children out of the rudimentary school on the other side of al-Roj camp and try to teach them in their tents.

“It’s what we give them, what I teach my sons … how to read,’’ Ms Assaad said.

“I barely knew. I left school at Year 9. I didn’t even start Year 10 when I left school.’’

Like other occupants of the camp, Ms Assaad gets a two-minute window once a week to send messages to Australia via a Whats­App messaging service monitored by the camp administration.

“I would really love to go back to Australia. I want my kids to get a better education, to live like a normal child. To know what life is beyond the fences,’’ she said.

Asked if she posed a threat to the people of Australia, she replied: “No, of course not!

“I want to study again, I want to finish my education. One thing I regret is not finishing, not being able to finish my education. I would have been able to give my kids more than I gave them.

“For them, everything they missed out on, I want them to have. A normal childhood, the education, going to the park, the circus, going to the movie, everything a kid would love to do. Going to a shopping centre and being able to buy what they want.’’

She asked the Australian government to consider that “every day that we spend here, we can never get back. I want them to have mercy on us and the children,’’ she said.