ISIS brides try to recreate caliphate conditions within refugee camps while pleading for ‘home’ countries to take them back
Since, the fall of the caliphate last month, scores of female ISIS members relegated to refugee camps in northern Syria have apparently re-formed units of the militants’ feared religious police, the ‘Hisba’, and are trying to impose their rules and punishments on others living in the camp.
Regardless of their clear unwillingness to stop supporting ISIS, however, many of these women are appealing to their former nations in the west for asylum with hopes that they’ll be allowed to come back.
Four ISIS brides staying at al-Hol and Roj camps in Syria who spoke to the Associated Press stated that they only traveled to Syria out of ‘misguided religious faith’, youthful rebellion, and naivety.
Now, since the Islamic State as a territorial entity no longer exists, the brides say that they made a simple mistake and are beseeching their former governments to have mercy and let them back in.
These women are among the tens of thousands of Iraqi, Syrian and other Middle Eastern women and children who were a part of the caliphate now detained in camps in northern Syria which are supervised by the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The four women all claimed that they hadn’t been active Islamic State members and that their husbands weren’t IS fighters. However, such claims and the vast majority of what they had to say apparently couldn’t be independently verified.
When speaking about her decision to join the caliphate, Kimberly Polman, a 46-year-old Canadian woman said, “How could I have been so stupid, and so blind?”
The leaders of Europe, Polman said, should be aware that ‘’we are not all criminals, that we all have the right to a second chance. What we saw with ISIS was a lesson to us and allowed us to gain perspective on the extremists.”
But to most westerners, any expression of regret coming from these former IS brides sounds like nothing more than manipulative, hollow, and self-serving speech meant to tear at our heartstrings.
By traveling to former territory of the caliphate, these women willfully and knowingly joined a violent terrorist organization whose atrocities against humanity were no secret and included mass public killings and executions, the mass sexual enslavement of Yazidi women, monstrous punishment for rule-breakers, public beheadings, and the hurling ‘infidels’ from rooftops.
Their pleas to return to the western democracies from which they originally came from pose the important question of what exactly to do with the men and women who joined the Islamic State. Meanwhile, the SDF has become restless and irritated, complaining that it’s being forced to shelter, cloth, feed, and deal with them.
But most governments around the world – with the exception of far-left Sweden and others like them – are highly resistant to taking back their nationals. Some have focused on the repatriation of children but not parents or other adults.
