IS Brides and consequences.

[Glaurung]

And what about her child, the young baby, that has now died? Did that deserve to be punished.

No. However the appalling conditions in which her children were conceived, born and died are a result of her choices, not the United Kingdom's.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I guess my ultimate question is, why did they join IS? Why did they betray literally everything they knew? Everyone they knew? Everything their home countries offered? I can intellectually understand a teenager falling for propoganda and being groomed. But I can’t fathom why Western raised individuals could ever accept IS. I mean extreme political idealogy, sure. But IS makes the extreme right look like a bunch of hippies. Is there a mental health factor that I’m overlooking?

I suppose the best source of answers is to consider why people joined other extremist groups, such as the P-IRA. For some it's a chance to make a difference, for some a chance to earn money, and for some an opportunity to fight back against a perceived enemy. Those who joined are often young, come from poor backgrounds, and are socially marginalized. From there it's really not that much different, on a social functioning level, as gang membership (such as fulfilling a need for group identity). And indeed such groups often prey upon those who lack social support in order to fill their ranks.

 

[Twilight Hue]

And what about her child, the young baby, that has now died? Did that deserve to be punished.

That's the reality we live in. Nature can be raw and brutal.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

We had some news where the IS brides and their kids attacked reporters and cursed them because they had no facecovering, ideologically they were still into murder. I think you would have to heavily screen those you let back.

Really, I don't think we should, unless it can reasonably be demonstrated that doing so poses a greater risk than alternative means of addressing this issue.
This may be a case where it just might be best if the state quietly takes them behind the shed and executes them. No fanfare, no news, just a handful of insignificant rabble rousers vanishing without a trace. They can't be allowed to freely roam, they can't be allowed to spread to their ideology to a prison population, and basically nowhere is suitable or safe from such extremism. And if one state doesn't execute them, another one will. And no one will risk war or souring relationships to save them from a state seeking justice.

 

[Twilight Hue]

How many bright decisions did you make at 15?
I’m not saying she’s harmless, or indeed proposing she be brought back.
But she was still a vulnerable minor under the eyes of our very own laws when she made that decision. A decision that has clearly already cost her dearly.

I tend to doubt it. Martyrdom is worn like a badge of honor with these people.

From a military and tactical perspective she ought to be tried and if found guilty, summarily executed for her crimes against humanity.

There is simply no valid reason to ever trust or feel sorry for a person like that in light of what she had done and the very nature of the group she was with.

For all we know, the likelihood she has sleeper orders to strike and kill others upon notification would be considerably high.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

From a military and tactical perspective she ought to be tried and if found guilty, summarily executed for her crimes against humanity.

That might be our best option, except I would keep the tribunal completely secret so there is no communal glorification of a martyr, no confirmation bias, and no chance of unreasonable emotional outbursts and demands holding up what must be done. They are simply far too dangerous and pose far too great a risk to treat as common criminals or murderers. They can't even be said to be like someone such as Ted Bundy, who killed because they are sick. ISIS killed because of hate, they promote hatred, and there is very little chance of them admitting they need to be locked up (unlike some serial killers who know they need to be kept away from the general public because of the danger they pose).
It truly is a sad situation, and though she and many others were only teens and emerging and young adults, it cannot be ignored they joined a savage and blood thirsty army intent on taking up arms against the world and leaving mountains of corpses in their wake. Some may have true remorse, but safety and well being of the many must be put before the few, and in this case the few being those who themselves extended no kindness or mercy and displayed a total disregard for the safety and well being of others (In all reality, they made it possible to say at least the Nazi's tried to be quick and efficient in their genocide rather than resorting to mass crucifixions). But it's not a debate of morality or right and wrong, it's an issue of keeping people safe from those who would kill them given half a chance.

 

[SomeRandom]

I tend to doubt it. Martyrdom is worn like a badge of honor with these people.

From a military and tactical perspective she ought to be tried and if found guilty, summarily executed for her crimes against humanity.

There is simply no valid reason to ever trust or feel sorry for a person like that in light of what she had done and the very nature of the group she was with.

For all we know, the likelihood she has sleeper orders to strike and kill others upon notification would be considerably high.

That is a valid point. Even if rehabilitation was achievable, they could also be relying on our humanity to slip past our protection and cause havoc. And she did commit what is essentially treason. I feel bad for the infants, but she chose that life.

 

[SomeRandom]

People have always been attracted to millenarian ideologies, be they religious or secular. The idea that you can be part of a chosen few who will be responsible for freeing the world from tyranny and bringing about a new utopia.

It's more useful to look at what makes people join millenarian movements in general than focusing on the specifics of what attracted people to this specific movement. Every now and again a you get the right social conditions and the right ideology for such a movement to take hold.

It's nothing new, has been happening for thousands of years:

Prophetae would construct their apocalyptic lore out of the most varied materials – the Book of Daniel, the Book of Revelation, the Sibylline Oracles, the speculations of Joachim of Fiore, the doctrine of the Egalitarian State of Nature – all of them elaborated and reinterpreted and vulgarized. That lore would be purveyed to the poor – and the result would be something which was at once a revolutionary movement and an outburst of quasi-religious salvationism.

It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless. A social struggle is seen not as a struggle for specific, limited objectives, but as an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed. This is the essence of the recurrent phenomenon – or, if one will, the persistent tradition – that we have called ‘revolutionary millenarianism’.

As we have seen again and again in the course of this book, revolutionary millenarianism flourishes only in certain specific social situations. In the Middle Ages the people for whom it had most appeal were neither peasants firmly integrated in the life of village and manor nor artisans firmly integrated in their guilds. The lot of such people might at times be one of poverty and oppression, and at other times be one of relative prosperity and independence; they might revolt or they might accept their situation; but they were not, on the whole, prone to follow some inspired propheta in a hectic pursuit of the Millennium.

These prophetae found their following, rather, where there existed an unorganized, atomized population, rural or urban or both. This was as true of Flanders and northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as of Holland and Westphalia in the sixteenth; and recent researches have shown it to have been equally true of the Bohemia of the early fifteenth century. Revolutionary millenarianism drew its strength from a population living on the margin of society – peasants without land or with too little land even for subsistence; journeymen and unskilled workers living under the continuous threat of unemployment; beggars and vagabonds – in fact from the amorphous mass of people who were not simply poor but who could find no assured and recognized place in society at all. These people lacked the material and emotional support afforded by traditional social groups; their kinship-groups had disintegrated and they were not effectively organized in village communities or in guilds; for them there existed no regular, institutionalized methods of voicing their grievances or pressing their claims. Instead they waited for a propheta to bind them together in a group of their own...

That peculiar faith which is of the very essence not indeed of chiliasm as such but of militant, revolutionary chiliasm – the tense expectation of a final, decisive struggle in which a world tyranny will be overthrown by a ‘chosen people’ and through which the world will be renewed and history brought to its consummation – this did not disappear with the fall of the New Jerusalem at Münster. It continued a dim, subterranean existence down the centuries, flaring up briefly in the margins of the English Civil War and the French Revolution, until in the course of the nineteenth century a naive and explicit supernaturalism was gradually replaced by an orientation which was secular and which even claimed to be scientific, so that what had once been demanded by the will of God was now demanded by the purposes of History. But the demand itself remained unchanged: to purify the world by destroying the agents of corruption...

The Pursuit Of The Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages - Norman Cohn

That is very true. Martyrdom and being "God's chosen few" is a particularly intoxicating poison to humans. I guess being so young when 9/11 happened, I only very vaguely remember what the world was like before that. So there's a little bit of inherent confusion when IS of all people can persuade people from the West to join them, on my part. Just seems so surreal.

Also thanks for adding to my already gigantic TBR

 

[GoodbyeDave]

No one at least took a double take at a teenager, without parental supervision, running off to a potentially dangerous country?
I remember once being questioned by airport staff at aged 16 for simply flying interstate on my own!

The security staff are Heathrow are more concerned which who comes in than with who leaves — at least I hope so! Also, the scale of the operation is huge: Heathrow is the second biggest international airport in the world, double the size of JFK in NYC.

 

[Stanyon]

And what about her child, the young baby, that has now died? Did that deserve to be punished.

The baby may have died anyway whether in the U.K. or not, the fact it died where it died is a direct result of the choices it's mother made. Begum had no problem with the 22 killed in the Manchester bombing (which included children) they were all someone's babies.

 

[SomeRandom]

The security staff are Heathrow are more concerned which who comes in than with who leaves — at least I hope so! Also, the scale of the operation is huge: Heathrow is the second biggest international airport in the world, double the size of JFK in NYC.

Which is why I don’t blame them.
If the Government knew and they have CCTV everywhere, was it too late for them to at least try to intercede?
I’m just trying to figure out why a Government would just shrug at a teenager potentially leaving to be a literal enemy of the state. If the allegation is true, of course. It sounds like a plot to a high octane American thriller honestly.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Do we have any responsibility to these ex citizens? Or do we just allow them to rot, declaring them stateless and allow the relevant foreign justice system to do their thing?
I mean they declared themselves enemies of their respective homelands, right?

Why do you say "ex" citizens? Unless they've gone through some sort of process to have their citizen revoked, then they're still just citizens.

There's one who seems genuinely remorseful and wants to return home, even if it's behind bars. So is there hope that there is some spark of potential to rehabilitate and return to the West?
Or is it far too risky for our relevant national security?

Any citizen has the right to return to the country of their citizenship.

If they've committed a crime, then they should be tried, convicted and sentenced. If they've committed a crime in some other country, they should be extradited. But denying citizens the right to return to their own country is a very dangerous road to start down.

 

[SomeRandom]

Why do you say "ex" citizens? Unless they've gone through some sort of process to have their citizen revoked, then they're still just citizens.

Actually many actually had their respective citizenship revoked already. Hence my phrasing. I don't know if it's all, though. But there are some..........."legal conversations" happening, let's say.

Any citizen has the right to return to the country of their citizenship.

If they've committed a crime, then they should be tried, convicted and sentenced. If they've committed a crime in some other country, they should be extradited. But denying citizens the right to return to their own country is a very dangerous road to start down.

Perhaps. But if they were to be paroled, would that pose any sort of threat to pubic safety? We're not talking theft or even murder, but planned terror attacks and supporting actual terrorists. Then there's the risk of spreading extremist rhetoric among already disillusioned citizens, susceptible to extremist grooming.

 

[Augustus]

Which is why I don’t blame them.
If the Government knew and they have CCTV everywhere, was it too late for them to at least try to intercede?
I’m just trying to figure out why a Government would just shrug at a teenager potentially leaving to be a literal enemy of the state. If the allegation is true, of course. It sounds like a plot to a high octane American thriller honestly.

I flew unaccompanied several times as a minor, and they only have a duty of care up to 14 (not sure how consistent this is across countries/airlines).

15+ fly like adults, so this in itself is nothing unusual. Thousands of people every week fly to Turkey so this also doesn't ring any alarm bells.

As for the government 'knowing', people are put on various levels of suspicion and watch lists or no-fly lists are higher up the scale.

Making people aware that they are under surveillance also makes people aware of surveillance methods as they can identify what behaviour brought them to the attention of the authorities. It is possible that they were getting more important information in a manner they didn't want to compromise.

We don't know the full story, but it's not necessarily true that they should have stopped her or were in a position to do so.

 

[SomeRandom]

I flew unaccompanied several times as a minor, and they only have a duty of care up to 14 (not sure how consistent this is across countries/airlines).

15+ fly like adults, so this in itself is nothing unusual. Thousands of people every week fly to Turkey so this also doesn't ring any alarm bells.

As for the government 'knowing', people are put on various levels of suspicion and watch lists or no-fly lists are higher up the scale.

Making people aware that they are under surveillance also makes people aware of surveillance methods as they can identify what behaviour brought them to the attention of the authorities. It is possible that they were getting more important information in a manner they didn't want to compromise.

We don't know the full story, but it's not necessarily true that they should have stopped her or were in a position to do so.

Fair enough.
There could have been a scare when I flew back then, as I do remember thinking it odd that the staff were so "excitable."

 

[esmith]

How many bright decisions did you make at 15?
I’m not saying she’s harmless, or indeed proposing she be brought back.
But she was still a vulnerable minor under the eyes of our very own laws when she made that decision. A decision that has clearly already cost her dearly.

I see you haven't experienced children throwing hand grenades into buses
I see you haven't seen the children soldiers in some countries
Age has nothing to do with a person's capabilities of killing.

One of the troubles with modern society toward children and the immature is that there appears to be the lack of consequences for one's actions.

 

[esmith]

And what about her child, the young baby, that has now died? Did that deserve to be punished.

She is responsible for the child's death not us.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

I suppose the best source of answers is to consider why people joined other extremist groups, such as the P-IRA. For some it's a chance to make a difference, for some a chance to earn money, and for some an opportunity to fight back against a perceived enemy. Those who joined are often young, come from poor backgrounds, and are socially marginalized. From there it's really not that much different, on a social functioning level, as gang membership (such as fulfilling a need for group identity). And indeed such groups often prey upon those who lack social support in order to fill their ranks.

To be fair, the IRA at least had a noble goal in mind - the reunification of Ireland after the UK stole Northern Ireland and mistreated the Irish for centuries, so I wouldn't compare them to Daesh. The British forces were hardly innocents.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

I say let them come back and be tried for treason, at least if they were adults at the time of their crime. If they were minors, put them in a rehabilitation program.

 

[Cooky]

And what about her child, the young baby, that has now died? Did that deserve to be punished.

You mean the child that died because of her bad decisions? I think her children should be taken away, and her left in the camp for good.