Amid fresh chaos in Syria, history risks repeating itself. Turkey has again unleashed its militias against the Kurdish enclave, and thousands more IS members could yet escape. That includes dozens of British citizens, from young children to Shamima Begum to violent male killers. No wonder Sebastian Gorka, Donald Trump’s counter-terrorism pick, is urging London to follow the American lead and repatriate its militants, hoping they can be tried and punished back home.

The British public and Government are dead set against any such repatriations. Yet it’s exactly this policy of abandoning both the detainees, and their Kurdish jailers, which endangers British lives — and risks blowback of terrifying proportions.

The end of the Assad regime has transformed Syria, including the multi-ethnic polity led by the Kurds in North and East Syria (NES). Emboldened by the collapse of Baathism, Turkey is conducting fresh military operations against the Kurds, just like those that enabled Gondal’s escape five years ago. At the same time, the change of government in Washington could bring its own challenges. Trump is currently weighing up withdrawing from the country altogether, leaving the Kurds, and their prisoners, to their fate.

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All the while, IS remains a threat years after their physical caliphate was eradicated. Attacks in Syria nearly tripled in 2024, while the top Syrian Kurdish commander has warned that Turkish attacks on their territory are further strengthening the organization. The group’s ideology is still potent too. Just last week, a lone-wolf IS-linked extremist killed 15 in New Orleans, underscoring the diverse threat still posed.

Any breakout would strengthen the organization’s resilient transnational networks, encouraging further attacks across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Even before Assad’s fall, the head of MI5 used a rare public address to warn that IS were the number one security threat facing the country, a danger that would increase exponentially if thousands of radicalized loyalists went loose.

Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Trump should push the UK to take back its own militants, ensuring they can’t fade into the wilderness, but finally face criminal justice at last. Nor is the incoming president alone. The Biden administration, the UK’s own terrorism tsar, and the Kurds themselves have all reiterated the same message: there are urgent security reasons for Britain to secure its IS members.

Yet though Khaled Issa, co-chair for foreign affairs in NES, warns that defeating the threat is “the responsibility of the international community as a whole”, David Lammy has poured cold water on any chance of a policy rethink. Rather, the UK looks set to leave its erstwhile Kurdish allies to guard prisoners alone.

As hardly needs restating, the establishment of anything resembling a new caliphate would be a disaster: not just for Britain, but also ordinary people throughout the Middle East. Exploiting civil war in Iraq and Syria, the Salafist organization rose to rule 10 million people back in 2014, drawing thousands of volunteers from over 80 countries. While Assad was responsible for the bulk of the deaths in his country’s bloodbath, IS’s crimes were particularly heinous. They perpetuated a genocide against the Yazidis; slaughtered Shia Muslims and Christians; burned and beheaded prisoners; paraded crucified corpses; raped gay men and threw them off buildings.

Amid this nightmare, the Syrian Kurds found themselves in an unexpected alliance. Kurdish fighters rapidly proved themselves the only force capable of defeating IS on the battlefield, winning global sympathy and ultimately direct support from the USA, UK and other Western powers. Turkey — which fields Nato’s second-largest army — had long fought a violent war against Kurdish guerrillas battling for autonomy. President Erdoğan, for his part, was unsurprisingly enraged as the US chose to partner with Kurdish ground forces. But Washington trusted their Kurdish partners, and ignored protests from Ankara to offer “temporary and transactional” support to a multiethnic anti-IS coalition spearheaded by Kurdish units. By 2017, this coalition had liberated Raqqa, the IS capital, capturing thousands of jihadis as they went.

Yet these battle-hardened volunteers didn’t simply vanish alongside their caliphate. As Issa notes, over 10,000 male combatants remain in Kurdish custody, all guarded on a minuscule budget and amid war, geopolitical isolation and economic collapse. Male militants are held dozens to a room in former schools, crudely repurposed as detention centers. These are places where disease and radicalization spread with equal ease.

Meanwhile, thousands of highly radicalized female members and their children are held alongside innocent, internally-displaced Syrians and Iraqis in a shabby camp-cum-detention center called al-Hol. Among the endless rows of tents, female loyalists run a clandestine “mini-caliphate” — where they intimidate other residents through beatings, arson, and murder. Some even hold Yazidi women in secret slavery to this day. More than half of the camp’s population is under 12, with female militants grooming and training young boys to continue the jihad. When I visited al-Hol, primary-aged children threw stones as we walked among the tents, raising their index fingers in salute to Allah.

While these conditions might seem a fitting punishment, in truth they only create the perfect conditions for the organization to regroup and rebuild: an ongoing sleeper-cell campaign outside the camps and prisons has killed hundreds of locals. At the same time, Assad’s fall has brought fresh opportunities for IS, benefiting in particular from Turkey’s manipulation of the Syrian crisis to launch fresh attacks against NES. Notwithstanding its claims to oppose IS, the Erdoğan government has happily indulged extremists elsewhere, allowing many thousands of militants to cross its territory into Syria. Today, Ankara bankrolls dozens of Islamist militias for the purposes of targeting the Kurds, including those sanctioned by the USA for sheltering members of IS, while top jihadi commanders have long hidden in Turkish-occupied territory.

Combined with the eagerness of IS members themselves to escape their rackety Kurdish prisons, the arguments in favor of repatriation are clear — not least when the numbers, for Britain anyway, are so manageable. With no more than 10 male British fighters left in Syria, alongside 20 women and 40 minors, it wouldn’t be hard for the UK criminal justice system to process them. As UK terrorism commissioner Jonathan Hall KC has rightly noted, a country of the UK’s stature could easily manage the repatriation of a few dozen ISIS affiliates.

Why, then, has Britain been so slow to take action? Part of the answer again involves Turkey, which is bitterly opposed to any form of political or diplomatic recognition of NES. Domestic opposition clearly matters too. Liberal commentators are doubtless too quick to paint British IS affiliates as mere victims rather than potential culprits who need to be brought to trial, whether in the UK or elsewhere. But at the same time, conservative voices are too hasty in demanding that IS detainees in Syria are left to rot, ignoring the reality that this places an unjustifiable security and humanitarian burden on the Kurds.

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What’s missing in all this is the voice of the UK’s own Kurdish partners. As Issa puts it: “ISIS committed crimes against our people, war crimes, crimes against humanity, yet there was no international court or criminal justice procedure.” He and his colleagues have therefore been appealing for the West to repatriate its own nationals; to set up a proper international court or tribunal to process those thousands of global IS fighters; and to provide proper financial, political and diplomatic support to their beleaguered administration.

A senior Syrian Kurdish delegation will shortly visit the UK, where the security threat posed by IS detainees in NES will be high on the agenda. But while these officials have met with Trump and Emmanuel Macron, British authorities once again seem terrified of upsetting President Erdoğan, the new kingmaker in Syria — and a key British trade partner. And with Turkey clamoring to finish the destruction it began back in 2019, time is running out for the UK to prevent a catastrophe whose fallout will reach far beyond the windblown camps of northern Syria, with fanatics far worse than Shamima Begum free to spread terror once more.

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”.

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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.

This NYT report appears to be the result of three years of lobbying to ensure that anyone who makes the terror group look bad is utterly erased. The truth is, the women of Isis are rarely passive victims. I have visited the section of al-Hol that houses foreign women and children several times. It is many things, but it is certainly not a refugee camp, unless the women are refugees from a terror state many of them travelled thousands of kilometres to join. It is a prison camp full of inmates who support an extremely dangerous ideology. (That’s not to say the camp doesn’t deserve criticism: the conditions are inhumane, and children in particular should never have to experience them.)

The first Isis “bride” I encountered, shortly after Baghouz fell, was a woman in niqab who started to shout, condemning me and everyone from my country for destroying the caliphate. More women gathered around us, triggering a ritual with which I would become quite familiar: exhausted Kurdish women from the YPG, a group that not only fought Isis but were then tasked with guarding them, brandishing their AK47s and telling me to move. I was “exciting” the inmates, who, I was warned, could become aggressive. During my visits, I saw women making beheading gestures. They often spat at our feet.

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My observations weren’t unusual. Colleagues ran headlines describing the camps as “toxic” and the inmates as “radicalised”. Women screamed on camera about the glorious legacy of Isis ideology and scoffed that they would never go to prison. The Guardian described al-Hol as an “incubator for Islamic State resurgence”, and reported several brutal murders carried out inside the camp.

But a year after the fall of the caliphate, Covid-19 raged across continents, and foreign correspondents with experience in Syria were refocused. The international news cycle was now in a furious pandemic-obsessed spin. Pro-Isis lobby groups saw their opportunity — and started to change tack.

Women inside the camps were instructed to tone down their language. Twitter accounts that had previously called for the beheading of journalists like me now took a more humanitarian approach. And it wasn’t long before NGOs adopted this rhetoric. Human Rights Watch started to issue press releases with titles such as “’Bring me back to Canada’: plight of Canadians held in Syria for alleged Isis links”. That particular publication includes quotes from Kimberly Poleman (“Let me be who I am, a Canadian”), who met an Isis fighter online and travelled to the caliphate in 2015. A year earlier, Isis’s Yazidi genocide of August 2014 had been well-documented. Poleman could hardly claim to be ignorant about the crimes of the organisation she was going to support.

But, disturbingly, Yazidis, Kurds and the caliphate have slipped out of NGO press releases, which instead focus on the rights of foreigners held in “filthy conditions”. Meanwhile, aid organisations have reduced their services in the Yazidi camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yazidi girls held as sex slaves by Isis receive messages on social media apps from Isis supporters telling them they are coming back to get them. Some girls refuse to leave the sprawling, under-resourced camps for this reason. Meanwhile, young Yazidi boys, having been groomed by Isis to fight and dig tunnels in Mosul, spend their days shooting things in online games. Many local aid workers are terrified of these children returned from Isis. “Can you take them to your country?” one camp worker asked me, when I visited.

Journalists, like NGOs, have also lost interest in these Yazidi victims, while anything featuring Isis brides continues to receive exposure — which, perhaps cynically, is why I believe some NGOs continue to champion foreign repatriations. Headlines generate interest, interest generates donations. No one seems to realise that Isis itself is perfectly capable of supporting its women — it may have been defeated territorially but it still has a lot of money in the Middle East, and a well-organised global network of supporters.

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More than anything, these last three years have felt like a bizarre experiment in how to whitewash the actions of terrorists. The time, effort and resources that went into reframing women who supported slavery — and openly told journalists they wanted to kill them and destroy their societies — is remarkable. Late last year, those of us who covered Isis for years joked that the next narrative to take over would be “save the innocent men!” And then, like clockwork, CTV News ran a piece about the British-Canadian Isis fighter Jack Letts that described him as a “bright teenager”. A few months later, the Guardian ran a piece headlined, “The UK government’s hypocrisy is keeping Jack Letts and his mother in purgatory” — in which the Brit is described as an Isis “volunteer”, rather than a fighter. The piece again omits any reference to the victims of Isis; lines are blurred, language is changed, and suddenly a man who joined a terrorist organisation is “a symbol of this government’s shameful unwillingness to confront the hardest of its responsibilities”.

Yet despite all this, you might find it strange to learn that I have campaigned for the repatriation of Isis members. Ireland, my native country, still has one naturalised citizen in Syria. I have advocated for his repatriation and subsequent trial — because Ireland is one of the few countries to have successfully prosecuted Isis members.

Former soldier Lisa Smith travelled to Syria twice and was ultimately sent to al-Hol. In July, she was tried in Ireland as a fully-grown adult whose actions have consequences. Joining a terrorist organisation that enslaved an ethnic group and sold young girls for sex is an action that deserves punishment. NGOs and journalists might see a softer narrative as a means to ensuring children are removed from prison camps, but there is no excuse for whitewashing the crimes committed by the women of Isis. The cleansing of their story will undoubtedly provide a template for terrorists — and only serves to embolden the well-resourced group, who are quite frankly laughing at us all.