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

Britain's Isis Matchmaker was repatriated to France and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment last year (The Matchmaker)

Britain's Isis Matchmaker was repatriated to France and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment last year (The Matchmaker)


September 10, 2024   5 mins

When Tooba Gondal, Britain’s notorious “Isis matchmaker”, callously celebrated the November 2015 Paris attacks, she couldn’t have possibly known that her destiny was to return to that great city as a resident of its penal system. Last December, Gondal was sentenced in Paris to 10 years’ imprisonment for Isis-related terrorism offences. “Burn Paris burn”, she had tweeted at the time.

The last time Gondal, who was born in Paris but spent most of her life in Britain, was in the news was in October 2022, when The Sunday Times reported on her impending trial in France. But her imprisonment seems to have gone unreported both in this country and in France. I only found out about it recently after idly googling Gondal’s name — as one on occasion does in my game — and there it was in a rather dreary and matter-of-fact diary report of the Musée-mémorial du terrorisme, which was created in 2018 to honour the memory of France’s terror victims.

The report records the following. Gondal’s trial was held from 1 to 5 December 2023. The prosecution requested a sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment, highlighting Gondal’s “role as an influencer in the service of Isis”, her “apology for acts of terrorism, including those of 13 November 2015 in France, as well as the carrying and handling of weapons of war”. Gondal’s defence, led by Marie Dosé, a prominent French attorney who has represented several other female Isis returnees, argued that the prosecution lacked the evidence for its claims and insisted that Gondal, from the birth of her first child, had wanted to “escape the grip of Isis”.

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.

“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.”

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.


Simon Cottee is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent.


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Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago

The spinelessness of the ‘governing class’ in the UK is repellent. Jail your own citizens for (admittedly riotous) protest rather than those being protested against, whose crimes are of a far more heinous judicial order.

The guilt for the deaths of its citizens, including young girls in Southport and at the Manchester Arena, lies ultimately with this class, and lies beyond party political lines.

Those who put their heads above the parapet to try to bring about change in a peaceful way have their banking facilities withdrawn by members of this class. They too are guilty, ‘the bankers’.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
29 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

I cannot understand why Western countries, including us here in the US to some extent, are incapable of understanding or reacting to a identifiable group of people who openly say they consider us and want to make us their inferiors, “dhimmis,” at best like blacks in the US after the Civil War, but probably worse. Jews and Catholics, kill them. Gays ditto. Women…that’s their real hot button. Just check what an honor killing is. It’s no secret, and yet everyone is just saying, well, they have rights, so let them take over. If they were Jewish or Christian and trying to implement such views, they’d be locked up immediately, but they aren’t. Unbelievable.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
29 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Agreed.
We need a Churchill, not the spineless or foolish leaders we have, to clarify the titanic clash of civilizations going on and rally those who value the democratic method vs theocracy and dictatorship.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 month ago

“Perhaps we don’t have the stomach, here in the UK, to ask such questions because we’re too afraid of the answers.” Do you really think the Met have the stomach to deal with the Islamist demonstrators who will attend the trial?
There was a way to deal with Shamima Begum and that was to hand her over to the Syrian Government. The UK won’t do that because on Washington’s orders we’re trying to overthrow that government.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 month ago

Your last comment distracts from the good points you make. The Syrian regime is an appalling one, but neither the US or UK were involved in the civil war or are currently trying to “overthrow” it. Of course in your world we are trying to “overthrow” the Russian government as well.

We won’t hand over Shamina Begun because of human rights laws, that she isn’t in British custody, and of course she isn’t a Syrian citizen anyway.

Your comment is typical Right Wing overreach. Anybody, just anybody is preferable to the West. A bit like the Far Left. Simplistic nonsense at best, toxic pro the worst forms of government at worst. If the Syrian regime had governed the country with any possibility of reform, the appalling civil war would not have happened.

Fergus Mason
Fergus Mason
1 month ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Nobody’s saying the Syrian regime is preferable to the west. However, if it got its hands on Begum it would solve the problem in a way that would guarantee we won’t have to waste any more legal aid money on her lawyers.

A Robot
A Robot
1 month ago

A very thoughtful and thought-provoking article. The UK is indeed lacking the right kind of law to deal with ISIS returnees. But instead of handing her over to the French, she should have been deported to Syria. Most victims were Syrians and Syria does have the right laws for dealing with this lot. E.g. under Syrian law, she’d get five years in prison just for being in Syria illegally.
Imprisoning ISIS returnees in the UK is a joke. They can spend their time inside brainwashing their co-religionist prisoners.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

And they’d be released early in favour of locking up keyboard warriors that criticise the government’s handling of illegal immigration.

Robert
Robert
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

Wait – does the UK really lack the ‘right kind of law’? Your government jails people for stupid posts on X regarding migrants or gives a stern talking-to by the police for posts about gender ideology, yet it can’t deal with this woman?
It seems to me the problem is unwillingness to deal with her out of fear.

A Robot
A Robot
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

Hi Robert. So far, only a tiny minority of ISIS returnees has been prosecuted. One problem is that their crimes were committed in Syria. There is no evidence, no witnesses and no forensics that can be produced in a court of law.
By contrast, Australia DOES have an appropriate law: if any Australian citizen is in a war zone for no good reason, then they can be prosecuted.

jane baker
jane baker
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

Riots in Burnley and Bradford.

jane baker
jane baker
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

The French penal service will well and truly f**k her over so she should be there.

Andrew S
Andrew S
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

We lack an elite willing to take a stand against the terrorism she stands for. Such a stand might compronise their clients in the UK. We have the law but I doubt the CPO (run by Starmer), the judges and the corrupted defence barister class would ensure a no-trial.

Michael Layman
Michael Layman
23 days ago
Reply to  A Robot

Are you confident justice would have been served in Syria?

Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
1 month ago

The rope is the answer. Terrorists fear the drop.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
1 month ago

The treatment of Begun is indeed shameful: not because she deserves any sympathy, but because, as with Gondal, the UK has simply refused to take responsibility for dealing with its own citizens and left it to other, much poorer, countries to deal with her, all because no British government has the guts to take the political heat by bringing her back.

A Robot
A Robot
1 month ago
Reply to  Jonathan Nash

You say that “UK has simply refused to take responsibility for dealing with its own citizen”, but Shamima is not a UK citizen.
Under the British Nationality Act, she lost her UK citizenship because “the Secretary of State is satisfied that the deprivation is conducive to the public good because the person, while having that citizenship status, has conducted him or herself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom”.
Under the Bangladeshi constitution, she could have applied for Bangladeshi citizenship.

George Venning
George Venning
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

And the Secretary of State made that decision after she committed her offences because he was unwilling to take responsibility for dealing with our own citizens.
All you have added is the method he used to duck his/our responsibility.
When IRA terrorists bombed British targets we imprisoned them. We didn’t strip them of their British citizenship (citizenship that they didn’t even want), send them to Ireland or Boston and hope for the best.

A Robot
A Robot
1 month ago
Reply to  George Venning

Hi George. I have to disagree with you on this. I am merely stating what is the law of the UK at the moment. You can disagree with the Nationality Act, but that fact remains that it is on the statute book. The Secretary of State’s power to deprive an individual of citizenship was introduced as a sort of quid pro quo because the Act formaized a whole bunch of ways in which an individual could get UK citizenship.

George Venning
George Venning
29 days ago
Reply to  A Robot

You are suggesting then that the Home Secretary had no agency in this at all?
Are you also suggesting that Begum is more Bangladeshi than she was British – despite never having visited Bangladesh?

Ian Wigg
Ian Wigg
1 month ago
Reply to  George Venning

I would suggest she voluntarily gave up her UK citizenship when she made the decision to become a citizen of the ISIS Caliphate.

Tom Lewis
Tom Lewis
1 month ago
Reply to  Jonathan Nash

I suppose the ‘real’ question is; Why would the likes of Begun, or Gondal, would wish to return to the West at all ? One would have thought that somewhere, such as Afghanistan, would have been far more compatible with their outlook in life, a marriage made in heaven, as it were. I’m sure, if they were to apply for asylum in such a country then they would be accepted with open arms, and nobody would ever hear from them or have to see their faces, in public, ever again. A win, win, in my view.

George Venning
George Venning
1 month ago
Reply to  Tom Lewis

Doesn’t the fact that Begum has spent years and a great deal of effort in order to maintain her citizenship precisely so that she can return to the UK, in the full knowledge that she will face a lengthy stretch inside rather undercut your argument?

Fergus Mason
Fergus Mason
1 month ago
Reply to  George Venning

But we don’t want her back.

Tom Lewis
Tom Lewis
1 month ago
Reply to  George Venning

Which rather begs the question, why ?
What’s in it for her, and those people similarly minded ?
Why would she ‘prefer’ to return to a society and people that she despises so much that she was willing to commit not only treason, but to also live amongst a ‘cult’ as close to that of the Narsties not seen since the end of WW2 ?
Why, given their religious and political leanings, would seeking asylum in Afghanistan, under the ever benign auspices of the Taliban be so objectionable. They wanted to live in religeo-fascist state, the Taliban provides that, what’s not to love ?

George Venning
George Venning
29 days ago
Reply to  Tom Lewis

Why indeed?
But she clearly does want to come back.
In my view, you break the law, you face justice. I doubt there’s anyone here who disagrees.
What is shameful is that she is willing to face that justice but British justice is, apparently, too frightened to face her.
The spectacle of a British Home Secretary cowering in the face of a teenaged girl (and pretending it makes him look tough) is nauseating.

Ian Wigg
Ian Wigg
26 days ago
Reply to  George Venning

She’s banking on her lawyers and apologist useful idiots persuading our decidedly partisan judiciary that she was a poor misguided trafficking victim and hence she’ll get off with a slap on the wrist, a council house, state benefits and probably a book deal (in which she’s the victim) which will get rave reviews in the Guardian.

Fergus Mason
Fergus Mason
1 month ago

She was born in France. We didn’t ask her to come here. Why is she our problem?

Fergus Mason
Fergus Mason
1 month ago

“She, after all, is still stateless and stranded in Syria”
Not our problem.

jane baker
jane baker
1 month ago

Good. Keep her there. The French police know how to deal with troublemakers. Keep her in prison forever. Evil b***h. She’d a been let off here and awarded compensation and a book deal

Richard Hopkins
Richard Hopkins
1 month ago

‘…the French report notes, there was a “lack of cooperation from the British justice system” in France’s efforts to convict Gondal.’

With m’ learned friends like these, who needs enemies?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

The cost of allowing such people to return to their “own country” must be enormous. We are in dire economic straits; therefore, I say these people made a choice and they should have to live with it. We all live with the outcomes of the choices we make.

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
1 month ago

Pure and simple ; capitulation to the enemy. It is not our country any more. Will only get worse under the Stasi State of Starmer.

Michael Layman
Michael Layman
23 days ago

Easy to apologise after you have been caught.
“a security period of two or three years, with socio-judicial monitoring and a requirement for care”, does not appear to be overly harsh for the gravity of her deeds. I dare say a prodigious male recruiter would have a longer term.