Alarm at return of 1,000 jihadi brides as IS faces collapse
BRITAIN was on high alert last night after security chiefs warned that Europe could be flooded with 1,000 returning jihadi brides.
European border agency Frontex said women and children going back home after travelling to join Islamic State posed a significant risk.
It is feared a legion of women will flood the Continent as the “caliphate” in Syria collapses, potentially putting the UK at the mercy of the terror group’s poisonous ideology.
Frontex said the threat was “evolving” and it was difficult to assess the long-term danger of widowed wives and orphaned children looking to slip in under the radar.
But it warned female jihadis had sought more active roles in plotting recent atrocities adding: “An estimated 30 per cent of 5,000 foreign terrorist fighters who resided in Europe, and left to go to Syria, Iraq or Libya have come back to the Continent.
“The challenges are even more complicated when adding the hundreds of brides and children. Almost 1,000 women from Europe have joined the different jihadist groups in the Middle East, mainly Daesh [IS]. Furthermore several hundred minors are also believed to have been brought to, or born in, the same region.”
More than 800 British citizens are thought to have gone to fight for IS in Iraq and Syria. But ministers admitted in 2016 that only 14 people who had fought for IS had been convicted of the offence despite it being a criminal offence to be a member of a terror organisation.
Yesterday it emerged taxpayers have funded a controversial counselling service for more than a dozen women.
Dr Angela Misra is attempting to deradicalise the women.
She said yesterday: “Many were forced to marry continually as each husband got killed fighting.
“To avoid being killed for apostasy [renouncing Islam] and maintain the resulting children and not have them removed by IS courts, they have to outwardly pretend to be supportive.
“I’ve seen cases where there have been young girls that have gone on the romantic idea of meeting a gangster hero who they could get married to because either they were escaping a forced marriage, or they were looking for a theologically sanctioned way to have a relationship of their choosing.”
Security Minister Ben Wallace said: “This Government is taking decisive action to protect the public from the threat posed by individuals who have travelled to fight in the conflict in Syria and Iraq.
“We use a range of tools to stop people returning and, where this is not possible, to manage the risk they may present if they do return. We have deprived people of their British citizenship and have excluded others who have never been British to prevent their return to this country.
“Where individuals do return the police and Crown Prosecution Service will look to prosecute them where there is evidence a crime has been committed, and in addition, there are various other means to manage any threat they pose.”
WHILE Islamic State falls apart in Syria as many as 1,000 women who went there to marry jihadis are likely to begin returning to Europe.
It is a criminal offence to be a member of a terror organisation so while there were undoubtedly girls who thought marrying an IS fighter was a romantic adventure they cannot be allowed to return to this country with everything forgiven and forgotten.
Ignorance is no defence. They represent a serious security threat and protestations of innocence and victimhood must be met with scepticism.
Thus the news that, so far, a dozen of these women have been offered a counselling service is concerning. Far from being victims of circumstances many could be actively plotting further terrorist attacks in this country.