Canada needs a better approach to disillusioned ISIL returnees
One-size-fits-all prosecution does not make sense, Hicham Tiflati says.
“All I want for now is to get my daughter back ... I want to hold my granddaughter in my arms. She did not ask to be born there.”
— Nawal
The debate about what we should do with Canadian youth who left Canada for Syria or Iraq to join ISIL and who show willingness to return home is an important one. With the exception of Denmark’s Aarhus model, a much-cited rehabilitation program for jihadist returnees, most countries are pledging to prosecute all returnees regardless of their motives and roles there.
But it is not enough to punish those who join the group or to destroy ISIL militarily — we also need to address the ideology behind it, and more important, to rectify the grievances that fuel their ideology, particularly among Western youth.
Nawal, the mother of a Montrealer who left for Syria, insisted on meeting me in person to deliver news about her daughter. We met at a shopping mall in Montreal.
She was very cautious, and suspicious of anyone looking at us or holding their phone toward our direction.
She showed me text messages from her daughter and pictures of her first granddaughter: the youngest Canadian in Mosul. Nawal believes her daughter now wants to come home after realizing how horrible things are over there.
Amarnath Amarasingam, who is leading a study of western foreign fighters at the University of Waterloo, identifies three distinct groups of returnees: (1) “operational returnees,” who return in order to launch terror attacks; (2) “disengaged returnees,” who have lost faith in ISIL, but remain believers in global jihadism; and (3) “disillusioned returnees,” who were mainly looking for utopia, but found nothing but dystopia.
Most Canadian women, for instance, left to do humanitarian work. Nawal is convinced her daughter did not commit a crime. “She didn’t go there to do jihad, she didn’t kill anyone, she is home 24/7,” she says.
I have been working with and researching Muslim youth in Quebec for the last five years. I am investigating their sense of belonging and their identity construction.
Also, for more than a year, I have been researching Canadians who have joined ISIL. In a struggle to uncover the whys and the hows behind their departure, I have talked to many of their friends and families.
Recruiters have developed innovative ways to delude and attract Western youth. Many youth are mesmerized by what they’ve seen online.
“It is like she was hypnotized for a while and did not wake up till she reached Syria,” said Nawal. Once they are there, they cannot denounce the atrocities committed in the name of their religion. ISIL considers defectors as apostates or spies. If you say anything against them in public, you will be prosecuted. Some youth are reaching out to their parents and friends for help and guidance about how to leave Syria.
If the only option we are offering to returnees, regardless of their motives, is the distasteful choice between prosecution at home or dying in shame there, then we are leaving them with few alternatives.
The answer should not always be the one-size-fits-all draconian approach.
It is important to adopt more open approaches to better distinguish real terrorists from deluded minors.
In addition to the three British teens, Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, some of the Canadians who have joined ISIL were minors, as well. Do we really believe that minors fully understand the consequences of their actions?
Returnees’ stories are strong tools in the fight against violent radicalization.
They provide tangible and unique insights into how they were trapped into believing the lies of recruiters. That said, the Canadian approach for “disillusioned returnees,” while alert and cautious, should also allow for a chance of reinsertion and rehabilitation in order to help them find a way back into society.