Canada must repatriate Daesh brides
Jihadi brides and caliphate cubs. With the men dead, imprisoned or on the lam, their wives and children are coming home to roost.
If countries whence they emerged — in thrall to the Islamic State, eager for betrothal to Daesh fighters — will take them back.
Idiotic girls — teenagers mostly — who packed themselves off to Syria and northern Iraq, slipping away from families, willingly giving up passports, sometimes taking up arms, often gleefully pumping out propaganda against the nations of their birth, urging others to join them.
Breeding. Because that, it turned out, was their primary value to Daesh, to populate the nascent state as housewives and mothers, broodmares for the next generation of Islamist zealots.
But there’s nothing left of the caliphate except for an ideology. As, according to the United Nations, upward of 9,000 people have, over the past four days, evacuated the remaining thumbnail of land held by the terror group in Syria — the village of Baghuz. Ninety-nine per cent of those in headlong flight are women and children, herded to nearby al-Hawl, a Kurdish-controlled camp for displaced persons in northeastern Syria.
The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Syria says the camp’s population is now more than 47,000, with women and children under the age of 5 making up 75 per cent of the displaced.
At least three of those women — identified by name in media reports — are Canadian, as would be their offspring, regardless of the fathers’ nationality.
They are subsisting, these woebegone dregs of the caliphate, in tents, without heat, with little food and scarce medical supplies.
The children are dying by the week. Many others didn’t survive the exodus. They are not to blame. Yet Ottawa has no plan to repatriate these innocent victims, hasn’t even offered consular services to their mothers. Officials here don’t know what to do with the wives and little ones, anymore than they’ve articulated a strategy for retrieving Canadian citizen fighters — a conundrum the Liberals clearly hope to keep off the radar until after the next federal election.
Kimberly Gwen Polman, 46, a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen raised in Hamilton as a Mennonite, married a Daesh fighter she met online. She was recently interviewed by Rukmini Callimachi of the New York Times.
“I don’t have words for how much regret I have,” Polman told Callimachi, claiming that she was thrown in jail and raped when she tried to flee Daesh.
Yet the group’s brutal crimes — beheading journalists, mass rape of Yazidi minority women — were well-documented by the time Polman crossed the border into Islamic State territory in 2015. She was already the mother of three grown children, not a naive fangirl.
“I’m not interested in bloodshed, and I didn’t know what to believe,” Polman said. “These are videos on YouTube. What’s real? What’s not real?”
Dura Ahmed, a 28-year-old from Toronto captured by U.S. forces, was interviewed by CNNthis month and professed no regret about venturing into the death cult’s heartland in 2012, married off to a fighter with whom she’s had children. “I believe in sharia, wherever sharia is. We must follow whoever is implementing the way, the law.”
And Amy, a 34-year-old from Alberta, who converted to Islam and embraced the cause with her Canadian husband — widowed, then remarried to a Bosnian Daesh fighter. Pregnant, she spoke to CTV last week. “I think I should be allowed to go home. I don’t believe I did anything wrong. I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t do any harm to anybody.”
Nobody wants them, certainly not the Kurds who’ve done all the heavy fighting against the Islamic State over the past eight years. With Daesh in its death throes and the U.S. preparing to withdraw its troops, Kurdish forces are girding for a planned offensive by Turkey. They don’t have the resources to mind the women and chil- dren camp detainees.
Abdul Karim Omar, de facto foreign minister in the Kurdish-held north, said he and the Syrian Democratic Forces have more than done their part. Over to you, western nations. Noting that at least six British jihadists are being held in prison — including two members of the notorious “Beatles” gang accused of beheading western hostages — Omar warned that the imprisoned men would be likely to escape or be set free in the anticipated combat to come.
“This region is not stable politically and militarily. If there is war and attacks, those fighters and their wives will come back to Britain and be terrorists,” he warned. “Not only the fighters but also the children. If they are not rehabilitated in their countries of origin, they will be ticking time bombs.”
Adding: “We did our duty here in this region. These countries should do their duty as well and take their citizens and judge them and take their wives and children too.”
Britain’s home minister, Sajid David, took the unprecedented step last week of revoking the citizenship of teenager Shamima Begum, who fled London at age 15, with two girlfriends, to join the Islamic State. Now 19, Begum gave birth to a baby boy last Sunday — named Jerah, after at 7th-century Islamic warlord. The father is a Dutchborn jihadist.
Begum has been ever so busy giving interviews to British journalists, pleading for rescue, although attracting little sympathy.
“I feel like I’ve been discriminated against because everyone was saying I was a poster girl for ISIS,” she told the BBC. “I’m being made an example of. I’m being punished right now because I’m famous.”
The imprisoned Dutch husband, Begum selected him after, she claims, giving Daesh a list of requirements in a husband, most importantly that he speak English. “When I first saw him, I was like, ‘OK, yeah, he is good looking … He told me that he was strict and he wanted a good housewife that stays inside. He didn’t want someone who is westernized and wants to always go out and stuff.”
Begum shares her tent with the aforementioned Canadian woman, Dura Ahmed, and her child.
The Begum family, who say they “do not recognize” the deeply damaged and purportedly brainwashed Shamima, but nevertheless support the girl and have hired a lawyer to fight stripping of citizenship from her.
South of the border, President Donald Trump, while criticizing other countries for not taking back nationals scooped off the battlefield, insists the U.S. won’t readmit Alabama-raised 24-year-old Hoda Muthana and her jihadisired baby. The convenient excuse is that Muthana’s father was a Yemeni diplomat at the time of her birth in New Jersey and thus not a U.S. citizen — a view shared by the Obama administration that revoked her U.S. passport when she left for Syria in 2014.
“I interpreted everything wrong,” Muthana said. “I’m a normal human being who was manipulated.”
Apart from the firmly unrepentant, it’s what they all claim, the Daesh camp-followers who now want to come “home,” their misadventures behind them, some readily acknowledging they should be tried and sent to prison, although it’s unclear for what offences; perhaps material support to a terrorist organization.
Professing their ignorance, they portray themselves as no more responsible for their poor judgment than the children they’ve borne.
But, repugnant as they may be — the Kimberlys and the Duras and the Amys — they can’t be left to rot in war and refugee camps. Certainly, their children are victims deserving of deliverance. And children shouldn’t be separated from mothers.
A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, Justin Trudeau said before the last election.
He was right. Now prove those weren’t empty words.