“What we must try to find out following the death of this ISIS
bride”
It now seems a
certainty that one of the three Bethnal Green schoolgirls who travelled to
Syria via Turkey last year, in order to join ISIS, Kadiza Sultana, is dead.
Given the difficulty of securing hard news from
Raqqa, we cannot know the exact circumstances of her death, but the story seems
clear enough. Raqqa is, after all, a very dangerous place.
The details so far seem to indicate that Miss
Sultana, despite her marriage to a jihadi warrior, did not find the Caliphate
the paradise she had hoped for.
Whichever way one looks at this story, it is a
tragic one. Some may feel some sense of schadenfreude at the thought of her
fate, but this is to be resisted. Rather we should try to understand what this
tells us about the ISIS phenomenon and the way that it attracts young people
born and bred in the West.
First of all, it should be clear that a teenage
girl from Bethnal Green can have little appreciation of what life is really
like in Syria, a country where even in peace time, conditions were markedly
different from London. Whatever romantic ideas Sultana and her friends might
have had about the Middle East in general and Raqqa in particular would have
been rapidly dissipated by the heat, dust, flies and inadequate sanitation, to
say nothing of food shortages and shortages of other things they would have been
brought up to regard as normal. A trip to Raqqa would have been a lesson in the
way the other half lives.
Moreover, being married off to a jihadi warrior who
was more or less a complete stranger could well have been more traumatic than
romantic.
Again, living under the restrictions that ISIS
places on all women, including its female adherents, would have been a shock to
any East London girl. After all, Sultana and her friends were at an English
school where they were free to do as other English girls. There would have been
none of that in Raqqa.
Finally, while Sultana and her friends might well
have thought they supported ISIS from a distance, the actual close up
experience of the ISIS regime with its draconian punishments such as beheadings
and crucifixions, might well have caused them to think twice.
If Sultana had managed to return to London, the
Guardian tells us: “In March last year, the Metropolitan police commissioner,
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, said the teenagers could return home without fear of being
prosecuted for terrorism, as long as no evidence emerged of them being engaged
in violence.”
One wonders why the Commissioner made this
statement. The “engaged in violence” caveat seems pretty meaningless. Anyone
who supports ISIS is engaged in violence, as ISIS is an intrinsically violent
organisation: to make common cause with them is to make common cause with
murder, which is surely criminal.
Should returnees from Syria be prosecuted? Yes,
they should, as should anyone who encourages people to go to Syria in the first
place. Sorry as one must feel for Miss Sultana, the truth remains that duped as
she was, she was also responsible for her actions and should have known better.
But the greater fault must belong to those who persuaded her to go to Syria.
The Commissioner’s words seem to indicate that one
can go to Syria to join ISIS without incurring blame. To believe that would be
to indulge in a misleading moral fantasy.
By Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith
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