Irish Isis fighter Lisa Smith was successfully prosecuted earlier this year. Credit: Norma Costello
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“Send the money now brother, we can’t wait. We are living with the Kafir [infidel] pigs.” This was one of hundreds of text messages I received in 2020 from Isis women living in Syria’s miserable al-Hol prison camp. As part of an investigation into Isis’s finances, I was posing as a lapsed British Muslim who had read about their plight and wanted to help.
The women did not hold back. Every day I turned on my phone to a deluge of Isis slogans, religious memes and terror threats. Images of destroyed western cities were particularly popular. I was told that terrorists such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the Boston bomber) were heroes. My new contacts would make jokes about blowing up London. They bantered about beheadings.
These women had been holed up in the Kurdish-run desert camp since the fall of Baghouz, the last Isis enclave, in March 2019. They wanted money — and were getting it. With the help of Isis women who had already managed to return to the EU or Turkey, they were spearheading a fundraising campaign to “free the sisters” from the Kurds. Their rhetoric was typically fiery, and the groups used encrypted apps such as Telegram to organise donations. Since then, I’ve watched as their language has softened — and begun to poison the West’s mainstream media.
Around the beginning of the pandemic, family and friends of Isis members began to gently craft a new narrative about their women. They had never supported the caliphate. They were innocents forced to travel there by men. They were, in their own way, victims. These grown women had been “trafficked” into Isis territory. Ignore the fact that many of them bought their own tickets.
This narrative was being peddled by a cluster of online groups, which had sympathetic names such as “Repatriate the Children”. The funding behind them is questionable: in Ukraine, where I am now, some organisations supporting Isis families were connected to Russia. Most claimed to be primarily concerned with the wellbeing of minors, many of whom had been born in Isis territory, were injured and, yes, should have been repatriated — albeit to countries many of them had never even visited. But soon the remit of these groups broadened. They began to speak of “women and children” in a Syrian “refugee camp”.
A number of NGOs have fallen for this narrative — as has the Western media. Where reports once condemned evil Isis brides joking about beheadings, now they depict the plight of innocent Isis brides who just want to come home after a terrible ordeal. Last month, the New York Times ran an article on the repatriation of Australian Isis families headlined: “After years of ‘Hell’ in Isis Detention Camp, 17 Australians Return Home”. The story celebrated the return of 13 children, as well as four grown women who were almost certainly committed to Isis once, even if they aren’t anymore. It also featured comment from the ecstatic patriarch of a large Sydney-based family from which several adults have fled to join the caliphate. There was no mention of those for whom Isis made life “Hell”: the Yazidis, who were brutally enslaved, and the Kurds.
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SubscribeI wish the author had explained why the media was so easily duped by the change in Isis propaganda to portray these women as harmless victims.
Is it simply that the victim narrative is so dominant within the msm that journalists will happily ignore every contradictory fact for a new “victim” story? Or is it nothing more than a desire for the next shiny clickbait story?
The MSM media weren’t duped. You should know by now they are driven to exploit stories from every side in order to pursue their own political or profit making agendas.
Do not send any ISIS members to Ireland to be “successfully prosecuted”.
The Irish legal establishment manages to be extravagantly funded yet ineffective as Lisa Smith’s 15-month sentence proves. She will be free to spread her bile among Ireland’s growing network of mosques within months.
Something I’ve never understood – why aren’t they being tried in Iraq/Syria, where they presumably committed their alleged offences? There seems to be a weird kind of extraterritoriality in play.
Good question, Tom. I think it’s the fear that they may receive the death penalty for their crimes and actually get executed. I believe the thought of capital punishment is giving our Western humanitarians a collective heart attack — no matter how richly deserved the punishment is.
Would that not be a good thing?
Definitely.
But that would be more in line with Islam surely? That would be more appropriate. Anything else would be a form of cultural Imperialism.
The UK with the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel and others have been trying to overthrow the Assad Government in Damascus for a decade. Allowing the Syrian government to try these terrorists would give the Syrian Government a legitimacy that the UK government wishes to deny it.
The judge took into consideration her “previous good character” and that she had had a “hard time” in Syria where she suffered domestic abuse. I had to read the paragraph a few times to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me. People always talk about bringing them here so they can face justice, but they don’t face anything like it.
She’ll be on the streets recruiting within the next year.
The ISIS Brides etc hate the west which is an idea they share with large parts of our media class who are all mostly Lefties (they love bashing Christianity) hence the drive from day one to minimise their crimes. There is a strange alliance between the Left and Radical Islam particularly in Britain.
The left loves victims, and the Islamists have perfected the art of playing victims. It is as simple as that! The left has still not fully grasped the unintended consequences of their uncritical stance.
You are generalising. In the UK many Christians are on the left!
I worked in Canadian CT for 15 yrs and have written to date 6 books on terrorism, including one on Western ‘foreign fighters’. And yet when I go on national media to say these women should face and receive punishment where their crimes were committed, i.e. over there, I am chastised and called ‘heartless’. When I say the children of ISIS ‘brides’ should be placed with extended families I am called a ‘kidnapper’. It is enough to make one despair for the West’s ability to understand, and deal with, the jihadi threat. Thanks for writing this Ms. Costello!
Thanks for your writings. Please do not give up to promote the truth.
Lefty Liberals have a death wish, maybe not really for themselves per-se, but for their fellow Western Brethren. You see the same in all the places they live – criminals loosened to prey on the innocent. Society managed to cause the productive to lose, and the unproductive to prosper. Economies managed to put all wealth and power in the hands of the Elite – It is all right out of ‘Revelations’ I suppose, the winning of evil over good. Although Tuesday when Americans vote you have the clear choice – more of this – vote Democrat; to reverse this sickness – vote MAGA Republican. Never was an election clearer.
I don’t know if it is a death wish as much as pure stupidity/ignorance. O/W I agree, I have voted and hope tomorrow Americans have seen the light.
Female privilege.
And female apathy for other women, especially those like the Yazidis who don’t share that privilege.
A disproportionate share of the media, civil servants, “human rights” activists who are batting for these ISIS “victims” are well educated, upper class women who would otherwise love to pretend THEY are the ones being treated like the Yazidi women.
I wonder what it would cost us to ship 10k Albanians to this Kurdish desert camp.
I’d chat up the isis bride in the aluak bar of The Severed Arms any day….Serve a pint there with a nice head in it….
I wouldn’t preen too much about Lisa Smith being ‘successfully’ tried in Ireland. She was given 15 months, a wholly token and inadequate sentence.
The left-infiltrated media advocates for these vicious ISIS brides, ignores their Yazidi/Kurd/Christian victims, all the while dumping on Israel.
Not surprised to see the NYT’s prints all over the problem. They’d back anyone with a hatred of western civilisation.
First, the NYT is a leftist ignorant organization. You will notice that media outlets softening their stance against ISIS are the same. Once a terrorist, always a terrosist. These “brides” deserve the same punishment as their male counterparts. If it was up to me, I would execute all of them. How soon we forget the barbarbic nature of ISIS. I say treat them as they treated others, with a sharp sword.
Syria is a hell-hole to be sure, but that does not excuse ISIS. The real victims are the Kurds and the remainder of Syrians who suffer oppression under Assad and the Russians. Remember James Foley.
The woman holding a single shot 20 ga shotgun seems a but under-armed to be much of a full terrorist. Was ISIS this simple an organization? And did they ride in trousers (or what ever shalwar kameez is called there), astride a horse, without the side robes to cover the legs as would be more proper? It is an odd picture, more of how a Westerner would envision a female Isis to be – which I guess is what she is.
Uh… she’s just posing for a photo. Obviously
If you think a 20 gauge shotgun isn’t a lethal weapon, you might have a rude awakening at some point…
Just a posed picture, it is the online narrative that is dangerous.
Thank you!
The MSM are taken in by these women because they WISH to be. It really is that simple.
Guardian, NYT and UK civil service are very much fellow travellers with DAESH. They had to keep their true colours hidden when the death cult was at its peak- now its been pushed back they are getting cocky and the evidence is bleeding through. You may ask why such a bunch of pro LGBT and pro trans weirdos make common cause with DAESH? The simplistic notion that my enemies’ enemy is my friend. Like many millions of Daily Mail readers i think the rule of law is needed to prevent the worst instincts of the Guardian, DAESH etc and am afraid if civil society’s laws fail then the more bloodshed is the likely outcome.Sadly that’s the only solution to the bad guys with guns and their noxious leftist cheerleeders who don’t have the guts to bomb or behead people BUT are happy to others on from a safe distance.
Guardian, NYT and UK civil service are very much fellow travellers with DAESH. They had to keep their true colours hidden when the death cult was at its peak- now its been pushed back they are getting cocky and the evidence is bleeding through. You may ask why such a bunch of pro LGBT and pro trans weirdos make common cause with DAESH? The simplistic notion that my enemies’ enemy is my friend. Like many millions of Daily Mail readers i think the rule of law is needed to prevent the worst instincts of the Guardian, DAESH etc and am afraid if civil society’s laws fail then the more bloodshed is the likely outcome.Sadly that’s the only solution to the bad guys with guns and their noxious leftist cheerleeders who don’t have the guts to bomb or behead people BUT are happy to others on from a safe distance.
Doesn’t this author believe in the sisterhood?
Actually advocating prosecuting other women… strange.