Why couldn’t the UK deal with the Isis matchmaker? Her imprisonment in France raises uncomfortable questions

On the last day of the trial, the president of the court asked if Gondal had anything to say before giving its verdict. “This trial means a lot to me. I apologise,” she responded, striking a tone of respectful humility. As the diary report concludes: “The court delivered its verdict at the end of the afternoon, 10 years’ of criminal imprisonment with a security period of two or three years, with socio-judicial monitoring and a requirement for care.”

Gondal’s imprisonment marks the end of a mad sojourn which started in January 2015. Gondal, then 21, quit her university studies at Goldsmiths, relocated to Raqqa, Syria, became a recruiter for Isis, bore two children, married and widowed three times, got grazed between the eyes by an exploding bullet, earned an exclusion order from the UK, survived Isis’s defeat at Baghuz, surrendered to the Syrian Democratic Forces, starred in a documentary about her life, and fled Kurdish-administered captivity after her detention camp was bombed by Turkey. She was eventually recaptured by Turkish forces and deported to France with her two boys in November 2019.

There will be many for whom Gondal’s 10-year prison term will be woefully inadequate. This is because of the scope and gravity of Isis’s many crimes, including the genocide perpetrated against the Yazidis, and the role that Isis women played in those crimes. Yet Gondal’s sentence is scarcely a lenient one and exceeds the average prison sentence given to French Isis returnees, which, according to researcher Sofia Koller, is six years and eight months. It also substantially exceeds the average prison sentence for female Isis returnees in Germany, which is three years and 10 months. And it’s a considerably more punitive sentence than the one handed down to the only other British female Isis returnee who has faced justice: Tareena Shakil, who is now reportedly an aspiring fashion influencer, after being jailed for six years in February 2016.

Yet back in the UK, Gondal’s repatriation to France and imprisonment raises some uncomfortable questions. The first is reputational: it is frankly embarrassing that the UK is unable or unwilling to deal with someone like Gondal, when the evidence against her was so damning, extensive and easily retrievable. From 2014 to 2016 she would use Twitter to launch tirades against the West and to recruit young women to the Isis cause. It is of course much harder to know precisely what she did in Syria when she was offline and how high up she was in the hierarchy of foreign Isis women in Raqqa, but it surely would have been possible for the British authorities to have mounted a successful prosecution against her. However, they chose not to and instead shifted that burden onto the French. It is additionally shameful if, as the French report notes, there was a “lack of cooperation from the British justice system” in France’s efforts to convict Gondal.

The second question that Gondal’s conviction raises is educational: had she been tried in Britain, we really could have learned something valuable about her radicalisation and the broader context in which it took place. And this in turn would have cast an illuminating light on the scores of other British women and teens who followed the same path as Gondal and who may even have received help from her in navigating that path. Gondal, for her part, says that she was “manipulated” into joining Isis, which is what nearly all the captured jihadi brides say, apart from the most unrepentant ones. The line that they were deceived by the false promise of a brighter world and were unaware of the beheadings etc. is, of course, bullshit — but it would have been useful to forensically sift through the lies in the cold and purifying light of a courtroom.

More crucially, putting Gondal on the stand would have offered an excellent opportunity to probe her about the offline world she inhabited in the months and years prior to her departure to Syria. We know that social networks and familial ties play an important role in radicalisation, so how did this figure in Gondal’s biography? Did she have a radical father, uncle or aunt, say? Which mosque was she attending and who was she rolling with at Goldsmiths (she had once excitedly tweeted about the fund-raising activities of Goldsmith’s Islamic Society in November 2014)? Who (if anyone) did she know in London’s pro-Isis scene in 2014 and what were the nature of those relationships (if any such ones existed)?

Perhaps we don’t have the stomach, here in the UK, to ask such questions because we’re too afraid of the answers. So instead we idiotically blather on about the online “grooming” of jihadi brides, without any actual “groomers” ever being identified or held to account, and warn about the dangers of social media, which can somehow transport someone like Gondal to Syria, make her enter into multiple marriages with jihadi fighters and turn her into a one-woman Islamic State media outlet.

The third question that Gondal’s case raises is S-shaped, because if Gondal can be successfully returned and punished then why not Shamima Begum? She, after all, is still stateless and stranded in Syria, after last month losing her final bid to appeal the removal of her British citizenship. But Begum isn’t going away and Gondal’s successful conviction in Paris may add additional pressure on a newly formed Labour government to reconsider the practical and ethical wisdom of indefinitely blocking her return to the UK.

Like Begum, Gondal has expressed regret for her actions and apologised to the British public. But has she really renounced Isis’s ideology and accepted her own culpability in the group’s myriad horrors? I doubt it, having watched her denials and delusions in Benedetta Argentieri’s riveting documentary about her. I’m also sceptical that prison will cause a change of heart in her. It didn’t, for example, spark a change in John Walker Lindh, who, after serving 20 years in federal prison for fighting with the Taliban, appears to have remained a devout extremist. So, too, has a Trinidadian woman who joined Isis in 2014 and is currently serving a prison sentence in Iraq; I know this because I follow her Facebook updates detailing the injustice of her imprisonment. “Such ideas do not reliably dissolve with time,” as Graeme Wood wrote about Isis’s ideology in the aftermath of the group’s territorial demise in Syria. “They sometimes become more concentrated.”

This isn’t of course an argument against locking up violent extremists, but rather a note of realism about its capacity to effect positive ideological change. Whether or not Gondal has changed or can change remains to be seen, but either way justice has assuredly been served. The only failure is that it wasn’t served here.