Experience: I was married to an Islamic State leader

John was becoming more radical just as I was becoming more independent. He wanted to go to Syria; I was adamant I didn’t want to take our children to a war zone

was born in north London in 1983 and grew up in a Bengali-Bangladeshi family. I just wanted to be English, but felt pressure from my family to be a “good Muslim girl” and to not integrate with western society. My family were dysfunctional. When you don’t trust your parents, you learn to distrust authority altogether.

When I was 17, we moved to east London. I made new friends but they were very conservative, religious girls and shamed me for being too western. I felt so depressed that I just wanted to become a new person. My cousin, who was a big influence on me, had been radicalised at university. She taught me about the caliphate. I would read a lot of Saudi Islamic fatwas online. I thought I was seeking the truth.

In 2003, I was at the anti-Iraq war march in London, when some men gave me a strip of paper with the name of a Muslim dating website on it. That’s where I met John Georgelas, a US convert to Islam. 

He’d grown up in a middle-class family, was multilingual and seemed so smart. I looked up to him.

Tania Joya: ‘I didn’t realise I was in an abusive marriage.’ Photograph: Justin Clemons/The Guardian

I married John on his first visit to London, knowing it was the only way I could leave home. Shortly afterwards, we moved to the US and had a son. John was becoming more radical, just as I had stopped wearing the niqab and was becoming independent. In 2006, he was accused of hacking into the website of a pro-Israeli lobbying group, and went to prison for three years. I was still financially dependent on him, and didn’t realise that I was in an abusive marriage.

When John came off probation, we moved to Egypt and then to Istanbul with our three children. He had mentioned going to Syria, but I was adamant I didn’t want to take my children to a war zone. 

We couldn’t afford to stay in Istanbul, though, and John told me and his family back in the US, that we were moving to Antakya in Turkey. 

Instead, we travelled straight to the Syrian border.

When we caught a bus in the middle of the night, I didn’t realise what was happening. I was five months pregnant, and just relieved that the children and I could sit down and sleep. By the time the sun rose, we were at a Syrian checkpoint and John warned me not to make a scene.

John played an essential part in establishing the caliphate and was a leading propagandist, helping to groom westerners

As soon as I could find a phone, I called his mother and told her John had lied to us. I cried and asked her to contact the FBI agents who had been tracking him for years. The FBI later told me I would not be charged with joining an extremist organisation if I returned to the US.

In Syria, we had no running water because the tank at the top of the house had been shot through. I was malnourished, and so were the children; I was scared of losing them. John blamed me for telling the agents, and I was so angry at him for tricking us. By this point as I was refusing to cover my face, and he thought I was an embarrassment. He felt under pressure from his friends to either leave or control me.

In the end, John showed mercy and arranged for us to leave, though I had to wait three weeks to get out because of road blockades and infighting. He paid a human trafficker to transport us. We were forced to run a couple of miles and climb through a hole in barbed wire, before jumping on to a truck under sniper fire.

The trafficker was supposed to take us to the bus station, but left us in the middle of nowhere. I was distraught, until a kind Turkish man helped us find our way. I was so grateful to be alive. I wanted my children to live good, fulfilling lives and to give back to the world.

John played an essential part in establishing the caliphate and was a leading propagandist for Islamic State, helping to groom other westerners. I never saw him again and learned later that he’d remarried in Syria.

Last year I found out that he had died, most likely during US bombing in 2017.

Now, I live in Texas, a few roads away from his parents. I know it’s good for them and the children to be close. My current husband is respectful, and caring; I love the freedom to be myself.

I’ve worked with the counter-extremism group Faith Matters in the UK. Education is key to de-radicalisation: you need to present the data, facts and science. That’s what changed me: I read widely, educated myself. We have to have shared values in order to live in peace.

(Source: The Guardian)

Qatar temporarily suspends entry for travellers from 14 countries

Qatar’s Government Communications Office said Sunday that in addition to Qatar Airways' announcement regarding flights to and from Italy, entry to Qatar is temporarily suspended for all those intending to travel from certain countries, as of March 9, 2020.

The decision comes as a preventive measure due to the spread of coronavirus, COVID-19, worldwide.

Hamad International Airport (file photo)

The GCO statement said the decision covers the following countries: Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Syria and Thailand.

The decision affects all individuals intending to enter from these countries, including visas upon arrival, those with a residence or work permit, and temporary visitors.

The statement said the step comes in line with Qatar’s efforts to take all necessary preventive measures to limit the spread.

The State of Qatar urges all citizens and residents to avoid all but essential travel at this time.

The statement said that these precautionary measures may be subject revision on the timely guidance of the national health authorities and international organizations on the spread of coronavirus, in order to ensure safety of all residents.

(Source: The Peninsula)

Kurdish woman fighters are finishing ISIS, smashing patriarchy

EXCLUSIVE: THE WEEK tells the story of Kurdish women who went to the front lines to fight ISIS

Clad in khaki jumpsuits, bandoleer belts tied around their chest and long rifles in their hands, they are the icons of unparalleled bravery. They are the antidote to wipe out the evil of a death cult that began casting its shadow in the Middle East. In the past five years, they were in the front lines fighting the unfathomable evil of the world, ISIS. They are champions and role models who set out a silent revolution after the outbreak of Rojava revolution in 2012. They are the women fighters of the Kurdish Militia or the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), popularly known as Yekineyen Parastina Gel or the YPG.

“For an ISIS militant, one of the worst things is being killed in the battlefield, that too by a woman. They believed that they would directly go to hell if killed by a woman. For me, I was the happiest woman, as I could send a few men to hell,” tells 19-year-old Sterek Judhi. Sterek believes that she had sent at least six men to hell when she was on the front lines fighting the ISIS in the areas of Manbij, Serekaniye, Hasakah and Hol.

Pale and frail, Sterek is one of the fighters with the all-female branch of the YPG. Sterek in Kurdish means star and she is proud that she is one of the shining stars among the female fighters. Sterek belongs to the Women’s Protection Units, the female Militia known as the YPJ that helped secure Rojava, the de facto autonomous region in Kurdish Syria, which is now targeted by Turkey.

A group of Kurdish women fighters in Syria | Bhanu Prakash Chandra

Established in 2013, the unit is comprised mainly of the ethnic Kurds who have fought alongside the male People’s Protection Units (the YPG) in the Syrian Democratic Forces. The all-female branch of the YPG comprises at least 10,000 women in the age group of 18 and 25 old. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist thought of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish women have been in the forefront during many of the political and military struggles in the Kurdish-dominated regions of Syria and Iraq.

They have been part of the Kurdish Militia, since the foundation of the PKK in 1978. They played an integral role in the liberation movement as guerillas, activists and politicians and have also contributed in a big way during the Rojava revolution in 2012. The Kurdish Military was formed in 2011, only to defend Rojava during Syria’s civil war.

In fact, during the fight with ISIS, women from the Kurdish Militia or the YPG fighters were on the front lines. And eight years down the line, after it was formed, the women comprise 40 per cent of the Kurdish military and it is hierarchically independent from the men’s unit. When Sterek joined the Kurdish Militia as a 13-year-old, she faced strong opposition from her family. Her father, who retired from the military, her mother, her four brothers and five sisters opposed her decision. Hailing from Derek in Syria, Sterek was inspired seeing the Rojava revolution. Though the Kurdish women are relatively progressive, she felt the society at large is still conservative. “I wanted to be independent. I am happy being here. I make close to $200, which is more than enough,” tells Sterek.

Sterek shares a very good understanding with her co-fighters in the same battalion, Danish Roj (19) from Al Roj from Ter Besbe and Beritan Qamishlo (20) from Qamishili.

While Danish has just finished her military training, Sterek has been to the front lines, killing several ISIS men. “When in the battlefield, our concentration will be very high. That’s the training given to us,” tells Danish Roj. In the Kurdish Militia, once a woman joins, she is taught military tactics and studies the political theories put out by Ocalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999. Ocalan’s books like Killing the Male and Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution are also considered during the theory classes. Ocalan, according to Sterek and the other girls, emphasised gender equality.

For Sterek, when she joined at the age of 13, she was in the military school undergoing training and studying the political theory. “We are given full-fledged military training only after we turn 18,” she says. She was trained for over two months and then she went straight to the battlefield to fight.

Whichever part of Syria or Turkey they come from, once the girls come to join the YPG, they are given intensive training: They have only six hours of sleep a day and they go out walking and marching inside the battalion grounds at 4am in the morning.

The training begins at 4am every day only to continue with the theory classes and they learn everything from marching, how to shoot, take care of their guns and staying strong on the front lines. One part of the training is to make sure that the girls stay psychologically strong, so that they don’t sit back when their friends or co-fighters are killed on the front line.

The women in the YPG take pride in talking about Ocalan’s science of women, referred to as Jineology. Jineology is taught in almost all the Kurdish community centres in Syria and Turkey, where a woman can go to learn about female emancipation and self-defence. These Jineology centres also assist female victims if they go through any domestic abuse.

“These centres help the women understand that we need not accept everything in a patriarchal society. Kurdish women are still subordinate to men,” Sterek points out. Sterek feels women are not just equal to men but are different at the same time. She is particular that she sports her red-and-black scarf around her head like a turban, every day when she is out with her machine guns and bullets.

“I am proud to be a soldier. I had two options: Stay at home and wait for ISIS to come or protect my family, my people and Rojava by joining the YPJ,” says Beritan Qamishlo, an Kurdish woman fighter. A soft-spoken person, Qamishlo is glad that she chose the latter option to protect Rojava. Qamishlo, who had been to the front lines, is a passionate fighter on the battlefield. She wasn’t forced by her family, she says. Rather her parents did not want her to join the Militia, fearing that she might get killed one day while fighting. But Qamishlo is a determined woman.

“We women have single-handedly killed at least 100 ISIS fighters during the final stages of the fighting. In Koban, when the ISIS moved to the front lines, 40 percent of the fighting force were Kurdish women,” she declares.

(Source: The Week)

The Syrian town with more cats than people

After months of intensive bombing by Syrian and Russian forces, the town of Kafr Nabl in Syria's last rebel-held province is now home to more cats than people. Humans and felines now provide comfort to one another in hard times, writes the BBC's Mike Thomson.

Crouched beneath a table in the corner of his rubble strewn basement, a man shelters from the barrage of bombs above. But 32-year-old Salah Jaar (pictured above) is not alone. Huddled beside him are half a dozen assorted cats, all as petrified as he is.

"It's comforting when the cats are close," he tells me. "'It makes the bombardment, the demolition, the suffering, seem much less frightening."

Salah's home town, Kafr Nabl, was once home to more than 40,000 people, but fewer than 100 remain. It's hard to guess how many cats there are - certainly hundreds, possibly thousands.

"So many people have left Kafr Nabl that the population has become very small. The cats need somebody to care for them and give them food and water, so they've taken refuge in the homes of those who've stayed. Each house now has about 15 cats, sometimes even more," Salah says.

Salah still works as a news reporter for the local radio station, Fresh FM, even though its original studios were reduced to rubble in a recent air strike. Fortunately the station's operations had been moved, just before that, to a safer town nearby.

The radio station, which broadcast warning of bombing raids as well as news, comedy and phone-in programmes, was popular with cats as well as people. Dozens made their home there. Its founder, the remarkable activist, Raed Fares, killed by Islamist gunmen in November 2018, even allocated a special allowance for them, to buy them milk and cheese.

"Many cats were born in the building. One of them, who was white with brown spots, developed a special affinity with Raed. She would go everywhere with him and even sleep by his side," Salah says.

As he leaves what remains of his shattered house, he is greeted by a near-deafening cacophony of mews coming from every direction, some light and melodious, others screeching and desperate. This happens to everyone, he says.

"Sometimes when we're walking in the street there are about 20 and maybe even 30 cats walking with us the whole way. Some of them even come home with us."

When darkness falls the barks and whines of numerous stray dogs add to the nocturnal soundscape. They too are hungry and homeless. Their nightly scavenging for food and a place to sleep brings them into competition with Kafr Nabl's cats. Outmuscled though they may be, Salah insists that there's usually only one winner in these regular confrontations.

"It's the cats of course! There are so many more of them."

Most of them were until recently much loved pets of families who fled the town soon after pro-regime forces launched efforts to retake Idlib last April. Now, deprived of TLC and regular meals, they have had to find new homes among the rubble.

And even though people like Salah can no longer be sure of staying alive, never mind where their next meal is coming from, it seems there is always a place at the table for his four-legged friends.

"Whenever I eat, they eat, whether it's vegetables, noodles or just dried bread. In this situation I feel that we're both weak creatures and need to help each other," he says.

It is not surprising, given the constant bombing, that cats often get injured, along with everyone else. Again, despite the shortages of medicines and just about everything else, Salah says every effort is made to care for them.

"I have a friend who has cats in his house. One of them was hit by a rocket which almost blew his front paw off. But we managed to get it to Idlib city for treatment and it's now walking around as well as before," he says.

With President Bashar al-Assad's forces now not far from Kafr Nabl, the town looks likely to be overrun before soon. Salah admits to being worried, not just for himself and his friends, but for the town's feline population.

Kafr Nabl today

"We've shared the good times and the bad, the joy and the pain and the many, many fears. They have become our partners in life," he says.

And he insists that if the worst happens and he and others are forced to flee Kafr Nabl, they'll take many of the cats with them.

Amid all the horrors of war, it seems a close bond has been formed between people and pets that will not be easily broken.

(Source: BBC)

Trump wants US companies to tap Syria’s oil, despite experts warning that could be a war crime

Experts say US is not legally capable of seizing control of oil fields in Syria, ‘I am sure people in the White House have tried to explain to him that is not how it works’

Having provoked bipartisan and international condemnation for abruptly announcing a withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria, effectively greenlighting the subsequent Turkish incursion into largely Kurdish-held territory, Donald Trump quickly did an about face. 

Some troops, he announced last week, would be returning to the country. But not to support those Kurdish allies, so vital in the US-led coalition's battle against Isis, but to "secure the oil," he repeated on Monday. 

More specifically, he has said he wants US companies to enter into the oilregion in Syria to tap the war-torn country’s natural resources. “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,” Trump said on Sunday.

US secretary of defence Mark Esper had announced last week that American troops will be deployed to eastern Syria to protect oil fields from Isis fighters. But now the president's latest remarks about oil have raised new concerns regarding his future plans for Syria.

Donald Trump has made similar comments in the past about tapping oil from other countries racked by war, but not while in the Oval Office. 

Experts argue that the United States is not legally capable of seizing control of oil fields in Syria and say the revenue from oil cannot go to the US Treasury.

“The president appears to believe that the US can sell the oil, based on his statements in the past about Iraqi oil and Libyan oil … thinking that we can loot countries,” said Benjamin Friedman, policy director at think tank Defence Priorities and adjunct professor at the George Washington University.

“I am sure people in the White House have tried to explain to him that is not how it works,” he told The Independent. 

"Taking the profits from the sale of Syrian oil for the US treasury would be illegal," he said, adding: "That would probably qualify as pillaging under the law." 

Pillaging another country counts as a war crime, as per the Geneva Conventions, which the US ratified, rendering it a war crime.

"Note that the troops don’t even have legal authority from congress to be in Syria, let alone to take its resources."

Mr Friedman says it does not make any sense for the United States to occupy Syria’s oil fields except as a way to deny revenue to the Syrian government.

“The only real goal is to continue with the fantasy that we are going to overthrow the Assad regime,” he told The Independent, adding: “I don’t understand why at this point we would be doing that.” 

President Trump’s point of view about oil seems to have been a way for the US foreign policy establishment to convince him to retain a presence in Syria, despite contradicting his own claim that US forces are going home.

“The Assad regime retaking power in Syria is the simplest way to suppress Isis – if that is the goal,” Mr Friedman said. The raid on Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's compound, he added, demonstrates that terrorists are operating in parts of the country that the Syrian government doesn’t control.

And now that the US has killed the Isis leader and the caliphate has lost its territory, critics say it is time to get out of the country and let the Assad regime take the lead in going after terrorists in its territory.

Trump has long argued, correctly, that endless wars have cost a tremendous amount of money to American taxpayers and there is no national security interest to commit long-term resources in Syria with no end goal.

“But the process is so botched and incoherent, and the decision has been reached without consulting allies and partners, that it is clear to me that any benefits of withdrawing are being more than compensated by the costs of poor execution,” said Thomas Juneau, professor of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and former Middle East analyst at the Department of National Defence.

“This is very unfortunate for US interests, which are not being well served at all by all this confusion, but also for those who, like me, believe that the US should act with more restraint in the Middle East,” Mr Juneau told The Independent. 

Mr Trump’s decisions over the last few weeks in Syria have played contrary to the argument that it is in the interest of the US to exercise restraint in the region.

And critics argue that as of late October, nobody really knows what the US policy is in Syria. What seems clear now is that the number of troops being deployed to the oil region is not very different from before the withdrawal was announced. 

And the United States seems to be pursuing competing objectives on the ground. “We have an envoy to Syria, Jim Jefferies, who still seems attracted to the idea that we can do something to hurt the Assad regime … even if not aimed at regime change,” Mr Friedman said, adding that “counterterrorism in the country is best served by giving up the fantasy that we can undermine the Assad regime and let it govern Syria.”

(Source: Independent)

Thousands of ISIS children suffer in camps as countries grapple with their fate

Many of them were barely school age when their parents took them to the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Thousands of others were born there.

The children are the most vulnerable of the Islamic State’s captured followers — the remainders of the more than 40,000 foreign fighters and their families who came from 80 countries to help build the caliphate. Many are now detained in camps and prisons across eastern Syria, Iraq and Libya.

“What have these kids done?” said Fabrizio Carboni, a Red Cross official, after witnessing the misery surrounding him on a recent visit to Al Hol camp in Syria. “Nothing.”

Children detained at Al Hol camp in eastern Syria. “What have these kids done?” said a Red Cross official during a recent visit. “Nothing.”CreditCreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Yet even when it comes to the children, the foreign governments whose citizens are marooned in the camps and prisons have struggled with what to do with them.

The Islamic State, researchers say, employed children as scouts, spies, cooks and bomb-planters, and sometimes as fighters and suicide bombers. Propaganda videos showed young children beheading and shooting prisoners.

Some have had years of ISIS indoctrination and, in the case of older boys, military training.

“They’re victims of the situation because they went against their will,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, “but that doesn’t mean that they’re not, in some cases at least, a risk.”

If figuring out what to do with the children is that complicated, deciding what to do with the women and men is even more difficult.

There are at least 13,000 foreign ISIS followers being held in Syria, including 12,000 women and children. That number does not include the estimated 31,000 Iraqi women and children detained there. Another 1,400 are detained in Iraq.

Women and children who fled the Islamic State’s last territory in Syria waiting to be screened by Kurdish forces in February. Most ended up in camps in eastern Syria.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

But only a handful of countries — including Russia, Kosovo, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and France — have intervened to bring back some of their citizens.

The debate is more pressing than ever.

In overflowing camps in eastern Syria, the wives and children of ISIS fighters who fled the last shreds of ISIS territory are dying of exposure, malnutrition and sickness. Children are too spent to speak. Women who have renounced the group live in dread of attacks from those who have not.

The local militias running the camps say they cannot detain other countries’ citizens forever.

Across the border in Iraq, government authorities are administering hasty justice to people accused of being Islamic State members, sentencing hundreds to death in trials that often last no longer than five minutes.

But most foreign governments are reluctant to take them back, leaving them international pariahs wanted by no one — not their home countries, not their jailers.

“Who wants to be the politician who decides to repatriate Individual A who, two years down the road, blows himself up?” said Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the George Washington University Program on Extremism.

The fact is, Mr. Vidino said, few extremists return to stage attacks in their home countries. But the exceptional cases — including the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people and two of Tunisia’s deadliest terrorist attacks — have made the idea of repatriation politically toxic in many countries. At least one of the bombers who carried out the attack in Sri Lanka on Easter was a Sri Lankan who had trained with the Islamic State in Syria.

Some countries, like Britain and Australia, have revoked the citizenships of their nationals suspected of joining the Islamic State abroad, effectively abandoning them and their children to indefinite detention without charge and potential statelessness. Britain alone has canceled the passports of more than 150 people, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, has said.

While bringing them home could pose an obvious danger, so could leaving them in the camps, desperate and disenfranchised.

Historically, fighters who gained experience with one extremist group have been the ones who seed new ones, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the George Washington program.

A bus packed with women and children fleeing the last ISIS-controlled area in Syria headed to a detention camp in February. Their countries are grappling with what to do with them.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

“Do we ignore the problem because it’s easier in the short term?” he said. “If so, it’s going to become a problem in the long term.”

But bringing them home requires foreign governments to answer virtually impossible questions, like how to separate those who committed crimes from those who did not, and those who still pose a threat from those who do not.

The puzzle has been hardest to solve when it comes to the tens of thousands of women and children affiliated with the Islamic State.

The once common view that ISIS women were passive prey, “jihadi brides” seduced into joining the caliphate and marrying its fighters, crumbled as evidence emerged that women had served as enforcers for the caliphate’s morality brigade or, in some cases, taken up arms in battle.

“The rhetoric from the media and politicians is they’re brainwashed, they’re deceived, they’re lovestruck, they don’t know what they’re doing,” said Meredith Loken, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has studied women who join violent extremist groups. “But even if they didn’t pick up guns,” she said, many were “actively contributing to this group.”

Some were reluctant accessories while others were violent zealots. Some were both victims and perpetrators, experts say.

Women like Shamima Begum, a British teenager, and Hoda Muthana, a young American-born woman, have drawn headlines in recent weeks partly because it is so difficult to size up their roles and the risk they pose.

Ms. Begum was unrepentant when a journalist found her in a Syrian camp in February, asking to return to Britain for her unborn child’s sake while insisting that the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, in which 22 were killed, was justified. Ms. Muthana later said she regretted joining the Islamic State, insisting that she had been “brainwashed.”

Experts contend that bringing ISIS members home to be prosecuted or monitored is smarter, safer and, in most countries, more humane than leaving them stranded in the desert or outsourcing their prosecution to the Iraqi justice system.

“I don’t have words for how much regret I have,” says Kimberly Gwen Polman, 46, a dual United States-Canadian citizen who joined ISIS in 2015. Now she is one of thousands detained at Al Hol camp in Syria.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

The Trump administration has called for foreign governments to repatriate their citizens, though officials have suggested that some detainees who cannot be repatriated could be sent to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

“They are your citizens, and, for better or for worse, you’re responsible for the mess they’re creating,” said Tanya Mehra, a researcher at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague.

Some countries say that Iraq should be able to prosecute foreign ISIS members for crimes against Iraqis committed on Iraqi soil. The American-backed forces in Syria have handed over at least 150 Iraqis and foreigners to be tried in Iraq.

Yet Iraqi due process standards fall glaringly short of Western ones. Many defendants have been convicted on the basis of confessions extracted through torture, including, according to Human Rights Watch, teenagers who said that they were beaten until they confessed.

Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council has said that at least 185 foreign children had been convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to prison by the end of 2018. Iraq is also negotiating with the Kurdish-led militias who oversee the camps in Syria for the return of the 31,000 Iraqi women and children but Iraq’s government has been unable to decide what to do with them.

Abandoning ISIS followers to the camps or to Iraqi justice, experts argue, may only postpone a reckoning later on.

“If you leave them there and you lose track of them, sooner or later they’ll try to come back and you have no clue what’s happened with them,” Ms. Mehra said. “At least it’s a controlled risk if you bring them back.”

Several countries have proposed an international tribunal to try ISIS suspects. While the idea has gained some traction among countries eager to avoid handling the problem themselves, other international tribunals — which have generally tried only top officials — have proved unwieldy, expensive and of limited effectiveness. Experts view the prospect as unrealistic.

Prosecution at home is also complicated.

Many countries were so unprepared to deal with returnees that they did not have laws to prosecute them until a few years ago; even now, those laws generally carry sentences of only a few years.

Foreign women and children at Al Hol camp in eastern Syria. Most countries have been reluctant to take back their citizens who joined ISIS, but leaving them in the camp poses other dangers.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Successful prosecution often requires resources that are hard to scrape up and evidence that has long since disappeared on the battlefield.

Countries have also struggled with imprisoning former ISIS fighters in a way that prevents them from radicalizing other prisoners, and then reintegrating them into society once they are released.

While no nation has yet developed a large-scale, tried-and-true model for detention — to say nothing of deradicalization, which remains an elusive goal — Mr. Neumann, the radicalization expert, said that those that have developed a more sophisticated approach have found that it often requires labor-intensive, case-by-case tailoring.

Some governments have appeared more willing to repatriate children than their parents, though few seem ready to send people to Syria and Iraq to collect them. Several countries require children born in the caliphate to undergo DNA testing to prove their parentage, and therefore their citizenship, before repatriation.

Kosovo, Russia and Kazakhstan are among the few countries that have retrieved children on a large scale, with the Chechen ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, organizing the return of dozens of Russian-speaking children and, in some cases, their mothers. In the largest one-time repatriation to Europe so far, Kosovo flew 110 of its citizens back from Syria last month, including 32 women and 74 children.

To help reintegrate them into society, some countries have favored separating children from radicalized parents and placing them with relatives or in foster or adoptive homes. While this approach may be the fastest way to rescue innocent children, it also means tearing them away from their mothers, many of whom refuse to part with them.

Tunisia, which had one of the largest contingents of foreigners to join ISIS, has balked at repatriating its citizens, leaving at least 200 Tunisian children and 100 women marooned in Syria and Libya, according to Human Rights Watch.

It has taken months of urging by activists and families for Tunisia to repatriate three children, including a 4-year-old who was orphaned when his parents were killed in airstrikes and two children whose mother remains detained in a camp, the rights group said.

“Every day they spend in the camp is one more day outside of school and their fundamental rights,” said Khawla Ben Aicha, a member of Tunisia’s Parliament who has pushed the government to retrieve the rest of the children. “They didn’t choose where they were born, or to have a jihadist parent.”

But the fragile Tunisian government has stalled, despite calls from Ms. Ben Aicha and others for it to take responsibility.

“We’re in an election year,” Ms. Ben Aicha said. “It’s not something people want to deal with.”

(Source: NYT)

Isis plot to direct new terror attacks in Europe uncovered after group loses last Syrian stronghold

Terrorist group has called on supporters around the world to launch attacks after losing territory in Syria

An Isis plan to direct new terror attacks in Europe has been uncovered after the group lost the last sliver of its former “caliphate” in Syria.

Documents on a hard drive, which was dropped by Isis jihadis killed in a desert battle, detail proposals for a “Bureau of Foreign Relations for the Department of Operations in Europe” to organise, arm and fund atrocities.

In a letter passed to The Sunday Times, a senior militant calling himself Abu Taher al-Tajiki told local Isis leaders he was in contact with “individuals who want to work in areas far away from the Islamic State”.

Requesting permission to set up the new “bureau”, he added: “Before they carry out the operations, they will send us the targets if the connection is secure. Otherwise, they do the operation. And by the will of Allah we will meet all of their needs, for those who want it.”

Iraqi Shiite fighters hold a captured Isis flag upside-down after an
October 2015 operation ( Getty )

Other letters saw the same writer offer to use sleeper cells across Syria to assassinate targets named by Isis leaders, following a series of murders and bombings in the group’s former territories.

One document detailed the leadership structure of cells hidden in northeastern Syria, including bombmakers and fighters.

The documents said one planned meeting with Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been delayed and it was unclear whether the proposals were ever presented to leaders, or if other copies existed.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have vowed to fight sleeper cells, following several bombings targeting their fighters and international troops from the US-led coalition.

International security services have long predicted that Isis would seek attention and legitimacy through terror attacks after losing its former “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria.

Last week, an audio message from the group’s spokesman was released on propaganda channels urging supporters around the world to launch massacres in revenge for the New Zealand shooting that left 50 Muslims dead.

The foreign secretary warned that people “should not mistake the loss of territory by Isis for final defeat”.

“As they are driven underground, they are adopting insurgency tactics and forming covert networks,” Jeremy Hunt wrote in The Sunday Times.

“The survival of their murderous ideology does not depend on control of territory. They can still use the internet to raise funds and spread the propaganda that encouraged young people in Britain such as Shamima Begum with such terrible consequences.”

The deadliest Isis massacres seen in Europe, the November 2015 Paris attacks, were directed by the group’s leadership and carried out by a well-trained and armed cell who previously fought in Syria.

Other suspected Isis cells have been arrested in several countries including Germany, where groups of Iraqi and Syrian asylum seekers were found to be planning bombings.

A former Isis militant interviewed by The Independent said that shortly after arriving in Syria in 2015, members of the group’s secret service asked him whether he would be prepared to carry out atrocities in his home country of Germany.

“He was speaking openly about the situation, saying that they have loads of people living in European countries and waiting for commands to attack the European people,” Harry Sarfo said in 2016.

The deadliest Isis terror attack in Europe, the 2015 Paris attacks, was
carried out by a cell dispatched from Syria (AP)

But subsequent terror attacks in Europe, including those that struck London and Manchester in 2017, are believed to have been inspired rather than directed by Isis.

Like its predecessor al-Qaeda, the group has reverted to an insurgency in Iraq and Syria, as well as in other nations across the Middle East, Africa and Asia where its fighters are active.

In recent days, updates on Isis’s main propaganda channels have claimed killings in countries including Egypt, Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Raffaello Pantucci, the director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said terror attacks in Europe are not the group’s biggest priority and it is unlikely to “dedicate massive amount of resources” to plots.

“The idea that Isis may have networks around Europe that might try to do something is possible but my question is why haven’t we seen it yet? What are they waiting for?” he told The Independent.

“Where they carry out their plots is to some degree a reflection of the leadership’s interests, and the core leadership is always going to be more interested in the Levant than they are in Europe.

“A bigger problem is what happens with foreign fighting networks. Some will keep on fighting, some will die, some will go to other battlefields but some will stay connected and get back home. Then they can inspire a next generation and that can cause problems.”

(Source: Independent)

Isis slave escapes caliphate with 5-year-old son after five failed attempts

Faryal was kidnapped along with thousands of other Yazidi women and forced into sexual slavery

One of the Yazidi women abducted by Isis in 2014 has escaped the caliphate with her five-year-old son after spending four years as an Isis slave.

“He was terrified,” she said, recounting their escape this month. “I held his hand and we just kept walking.”

The walk to freedom lasted 53 hours, and the little boy cried all the way. It wasn't their first escape attempt – Faryal had tried five times before to flee Isis – but they would be shot on the spot if the militants caught them now.

They passed corpses in the darkness, and when exhaustion overwhelmed them, they huddled together and slept on the dusty path. Faryal whispered reassurances to her five-year-old son, telling him that his grandparents were waiting and that, after four years as prisoners of Isis, they were finally going home. He wouldn't believe her.

As members of Iraq's Yazidi minority, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group, the pair had escaped what the UN has called a genocide.

Isis militants kidnapped thousands of Yazidis on a single day in August 2014, massacring the men and dumping them in mass graves, and forcing the women into sexual slavery.

Women and children flee the Islamic State’s last holdout of Baghouz which is surrounded by US-backed forces ( DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images )

During her captivity, Faryal said she had six different owners, at times being passed on when a fighter wanted a new sexual partner or simply to settle a debt. “Monsters who treated us like animals,” is how she described them.

The atrocities committed against the Yazidis had initially prompted the US to launch airstrikes against the militants and begin a military campaign to roll back Isis's caliphate that now, four years later, could end within days. US-backed forces have the last Isis holdouts surrounded in the eastern Syrian hamlet of Baghouz.

In photographs, taken by aid workers on the night of her escape, a male companion hides his face but Faryal looks straight out at the camera. Her hazel eyes are fixed in a quiet stare. Her son's face is wet with tears, and he is sobbing. “I can't put into words how I was feeling at that moment,” she said. “All I could think was: 'Please, take me away from here.' ”

Faryal, 20, told her story last week in the northern Syrian town of Amuda after being transferred there by the US-backed Kurdish forces that rescued them. Throughout the interview, she kept a watchful eye on Hoshyar, her son, pulling him close as he cried and then trying, without success, to make him laugh.

 Details of her account were corroborated by members of her family in northern Iraq and through a team of Yazidi activists that had communicated with her secretly for months before the escape in attempts to smuggle her to safety.

The day before Faryal's life changed forever in 2014 had dawned like any other in the Iraqi village of Tel Banat. She pottered around the house looking after her infant son Hoshyar, she recalled. By midday, the sun was roasting, and although rumours had swirled for weeks that Isis forces were drawing closer, few in Tel Banat were aware of the coming storm.

The Islamist militants arrived at dusk.

“We couldn't run fast enough,” Faryal remembered, describing how she and 10 members of her extended family had piled into a car and joined an epic exodus. Yazidi towns and villages around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq emptied within hours as more than 100,000 people fled to higher ground. Faryal and her husband, Hashem, made it only a few miles before militants blocked their path.

Yazidis have long faced persecution from more powerful religious groups for their beliefs, in part because of a false but commonly-held impression that they worship the sun, or the devil. There are fewer than one million Yazidis worldwide, and according to the UN, Isis had intended to entirely wipe out those within their reach.

Yazidi men and boys who had reached puberty were separated from the women and other children and often shot dead at roadsides. Women were bused to temporary holding sites and then sold to Isis fighters at slave markets.

Isis clerics had decided that having slaves was religiously sanctioned, institutionalising sexual violence across their caliphate. Women have reported being tied to beds during daily assaults. They were sold from man to man. Gang rape was common.

Many women and girls committed suicide in the opening months of captivity, according to Yazidi rights groups. Others harmed themselves to appear less appealing to fighters who might consider buying them.

Faryal recalled that an Isis fighter who was Iraqi and called himself Abu Kattab was her worst abuser. Hoshyar was abused, too, Faryal said. Abu Kattab beat him so badly there were hand prints on his face. Another had forced the boy's arm onto a hot plate.

“He was so small, but for some reason the fighters hated him,” Faryal said. “I could never explain to him why.”

As the boy sat beside his mother last week, his eyes moved slowly from side to side as if scanning the room for threats. His blond hair was cut in jagged chunks. He did not speak and he did not smile.

At its height in 2014, Isis's self-proclaimed caliphate covered territory in Syria and Iraq the size of Britain, and the movement drew recruits from around the world. In the intervening years, thousands of Yazidi women fled the territory held by the militants, but Faryal couldn't escape.

With each unsuccessful attempt to escape, the punishment grew harsher, she said. By 2017, she said, she had given up. Keeping her head down and accepting the abuse seemed the only way to keep Hoshyar alive, and the child was fraying badly. Their owners starved him and often forbade him to go to the toilet.

“I knew that if I fought back, they would take him from me forever,” she said. “They did that to so many women.”

There was one final act of resistance, though: a tattoo of her husband's name, inked in kohl and water on the back of her right hand. It took five days to complete, and the pain lasted even longer. It was, she sometimes told herself, a reminder of a life that could still be hers. At other times, she lost all hope.

In its final months, as the caliphate shrank to a sliver, her captors were moving weekly to outrun US airstrikes. But the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces were closing in.

Food supplies ran so low that Faryal said she sometimes went days without eating, spending her money instead on small sandwiches for Hoshyar.

When the pair was struck by shrapnel in the Syrian hamlet of Baghouz in January, no medical care was available. The village clinic had been abandoned, left littered with empty drug packets and syringes.

“We were pushed out onto the street, still bleeding. There were no drugs left, and we saw people in the road being left for dead,” she said.

Their chance to escape came when several Isis fighters grew desperate and plotted to use Faryal and Hoshyar as their ticket out. After years of abusive behavior, the militants decided to style themselves as the Yazidis' guardians and surrender to the forces surrounding their last stronghold.

At 2.30pm one afternoon, they all set out from their tent in Baghouz. An Uzbek fighter and his family pushed the young mother out in front of them as they started down the dusty path. They walked for two days in the cold, following the only path out of what had once been the caliphate.

At 8pm on the second day, they heard shouting. Beams from flashlights bounced off the sky. It was the US-backed soldiers.

Isis fighters raised their hands above their heads and cried out for mercy. They claimed that they were helping a Yazidi escape and had kept her safe, according to someone present at the screening point that night. The appeal fell on deaf ears, and the men were detained as Faryal and Hoshyar carried on walking.

It took three days for the pair to finally believe they might be free. They still fear that the extremists will come back for them.

“As long as I'm alive, I'll be scared of them,” Faryal said, tensing her shoulders as she gripped her tattooed hand with the other. “My spirit might be strong, but my mind will never rest.”

(Source: The Independent)

Shamima Begum in Syria: Where now for IS bride?

I saw her approach through the crowded camp and recognised her from her shoes.

They peeked out from underneath her black abaya; like a child's trainers they were red, blue and gold but almost in pieces. I'd spotted them when we first met two days earlier.

Shamima Begum took off her veil, and carefully sat down in the director's office, in the al-Hol internment camp in north-eastern Syria.

A tiny squeal came from under the stained, black dress. Her three-day-old son Jarrah was cradled underneath.

There had been an international search for her when, at 15 years old, she disappeared four years ago, along with two school friends from the Bethnal Green Academy in east London. She'd left to join the Islamic State group (IS).

And now the world wanted her to disappear again.

'I wanted to get married'
When asked, she professed ignorance of the jihadist group's worst crimes - the enslavement of the Yazidi people and the rest of the appalling crimes they committed in Iraq and Syria.

But she also justified some - claiming, in a twisted logic - that the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in 2017, which killed 22 people, many of them children, was no worse than Western air strikes here in Syria. The fact that one followed the other didn't seem to figure in her thinking.

On our second meeting, the public anger about her crime and her request to now come back to Britain, had sunk in. She was more apologetic. But by then it was too late. The UK home secretary had stripped her of her citizenship.

There are already more than a dozen British women and children in camps here, but none have captured public attention like her.

Shamima Begum was 15 and living in Bethnal Green, London, when she left the UK in 2015

As a reporter I've interviewed many IS fighters, including the men accused of beheading the American journalist, James Foley, and British aid workers Alan Henning and David Haines.

There was outrage, but not on anything like the same scale as that directed at Shamima Begum. She isn't accused of murder, but her betrayal of Britain by committing the crime of joining a "proscribed terror group" stings deeply.

And there was anger, too, that we were giving her airtime, even though she was strongly challenged on her outrageous answers - including an attempt to justify the institutionalised rape of Yazidi women. Her lack of contrition - though she did express regret - was particularly galling.

Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum (l-r) in photos issued by police after they left the UK

British citizens played an outsized role in the IS group. Other European countries contributed more fighters but they didn't have Jihadi John. Mohammed Emwazzi, to give him his real name, horrified us, revelling in his murders and goading the West to come get him. He was killed eventually in a drone strike in Raqqa.

Shamima Begum liked those videos. Those horror films, and others promising an Islamic religious paradise, drew her to IS. How could she leave Britain - leave us - for that?

"I wanted to get married and my parents wouldn't let me," she responded.

'I don't know where I'll end up'
If the public was ill-prepared for the 19-year-old's reappearance, then so too was the British government.

Until she's 21 she has the right to Bangladeshi citizenship. That was enough space - "a very limited loophole" as one diplomat described it to me - for her to be declared no longer British; no longer Britain's problem.

As I sit here in Deir al-Zour province in south-eastern Syria, the caliphate she joined willingly is dying. Thirty trucks just left the tiny strip of land they hold in the tiny village of Baghuz, full of IS supporters and others. Earlier in the week, more than 2,000 people were evacuated from the area.

They haven't been processed yet, but intelligence suggests that British women will be among them. British fighters too are still inside - will they die in the last battle or will they surrender? And if they survive, will there be more "very limited loopholes" to stop them from returning to Britain too?

Russia, Kazakhstan and the United States have taken back women from areas under IS control. European countries have not. Iraq and Tunisia have taken back IS fighters; Britain, like many others, has not.

There are risks in letting these people become someone else's problem. The Syrian Kurds holding them say there should be international tribunals here in Syria. After all, it's where they did the most harm. But with US forces leaving, will the detained suspects and their family members be secure?

And there is the risk that in Syria's ever-changing alliances, the Kurds could hand them over to the regime. Let's not forget that President Bashar al-Assad was once happy to funnel foreign and local extremists into Iraq to attack Western forces there. He can't be trusted with Western prisoners.

Shamima Begum may disappear from public view soon (to where, I don't know - Bangladesh, says it doesn't want her either).

At the end of our second interview, she slowly rose from the chair and, replacing her veil, left to feed her child.

"I don't know where I'll end up," she said.

I watched the black figure with tattered shoes disappear into the teeming camp. Many others have followed in her footsteps from Britain, to Syria, and the Islamic State group. And we still don't know where they will end up either.

(Source: BBC)