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”.

Suggested reading

The Shamima Begum delusion

By Simon Cottee

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.

Suggested reading

Jihadi John created online censorship

By Liam Duffy

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.

Suggested reading

How bin Laden won

By Aris Roussinos

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.

You could, of course, join the army of the state you were born in — the state which had given you an education, safety, sanctuary and freedom of religious worship, and whose armies aimed to expand those rights to others. Or you could choose to fight for the opposition and fight against people of your own age, from your own country, and to deny the rights you enjoyed to strangers in faraway lands. Either way, once the hostilities were over — or even before that, if you fancied — everyone from both sides could return back to their hometowns and call it quits.

For years we suffered the consequences of this curious historical anomaly. It started in the more complex battlefields of the Balkan in the 1990s, when western states like Britain and France weren’t so sure of what they were dealing with. Then people who had gone to fight with the mujahideen would come back, tell people in their home countries of what they had done and help to heroise and metastasise their growing ideological movement. It was a relatively novel movement, and there was not much that western governments could do.

During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the western nations came to learn the difficulties involved in dealing with this very modern problem. The Americans set up one option — Guantanamo Bay — which faltered from the start, not just because of bad PR but from the inadequacies of any justice system to deal with such people. How could you treat with members of an army who were not in uniform, representing non-state actors or states that didn’t formally exist?

As the Guantanamo trials dragged through their first and into their second decade the lawyers and human rights campaigners stressed the inhumanity of keeping people awaiting trial for so many years. But their own answers were always pat and inadequate, boiling down to “Why not just put them in front of a jury like any other criminal?”

The answers were many, but they all centred on issues of collecting evidence, putting such evidence in front of a jury and ensuring a fair trial. The difficulty of prosecuting people for fighting on a foreign battlefield were not a demonstration of western inhumanity. They were evidence — if anything — of an excess of that humanity, a desire to extend a principle even to its utmost extent. But what nobody wanted (other than supporters of the fighters themselves) was for hundreds or even thousands of people to be put through trials which failed and saw dangerous people back on the streets of their home country.

More from this author

So much for the bravery of the Harper's letter

By Douglas Murray

In these circumstances it is a striking failure of our political and legal systems that the case of Shamima Begum should ever have arisen. True there is one complicating factor, which is that she was 15 when she left the UK and headed to join the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. But that aside the case is in many ways very straightforward. Ms Begum — like hundreds of other young Muslims from the UK — heard the call of the “Caliphate” and in 2015 she went to join it.

Like many others the precise details of what she did there are opaque and different rumours and accounts circulate. By her own account she was merely a nice ISIS housewife; by the recollections of others she was involved in the darkest aspects of a group unparalleled in its depravity this century, helping to stitch suicide vests and more. Of course she and her lawyers present her as a victim, in the process once again demeaning the real victims of ISIS — the Yazidis, the Christians, the “wrong type of Muslims” and anyone else who failed to sign up to their fanatical sect.

This is all part of a very familiar pattern. Among the Westerners who went to join ISIS a great many come back saying that they didn’t really see anything, that they didn’t know what they were signing up to and that in any case they were the ones who suffered most.

All of this is impossible for any fair-minded person to believe. Even at the age of 15 nobody could have mistaken ISIS for a Butlin’s Holiday camp; nobody can believe that recruits were not involved in the day-to-day barbarism of the group. And nobody can have very much sympathy for people who knowingly went to join a head-hacking movement only to be disappointed to discover that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Begum did not help herself when she first spoke to media who had tracked her down after the Caliphate’s collapse. In an interview with The Times correspondent who found her in a refugee camp in northern Syria she said that she had not been much bothered by seeing a decapitated body because she knew that the person must have been “an enemy of Islam”.

The British public does not warm to such talk, strangely enough, but soon Begum had lawyers and PR support and they clearly realised that she needed to work on her public image. Begum may have personally renounced her British citizenship the moment she went to join the Islamic State, but these people argued that she was a British citizen whether Britain liked it or not, and that she should return.

More from this author

Cambridge University's very modern bigotry

By Douglas Murray

In the period since The Times interview Begum and her supporters have been working on her public image. Not only has she started to say nice things about Britain, but she made sure that kitsch little touches entered the fray. For instance she had a cushion carefully scattered behind her which just happened to have the Union Jack flag on it.

By this point she had reason to be worried, since the-then Home Secretary Sajid Javid had revoked her British citizenship. Begum and her lawyers vowed to reverse this decision, and now indeed it seems she may be successful — for yesterday the Court of Appeal announced that in its opinion Begum had been denied a fair hearing in this matter because she could not make her case from the refugee camp she is in. The court’s judgement means that Begum may now be allowed to return to the UK to fight the Government’s decision to remove her citizenship.

Let me, then, make a prediction: if Begum steps foot back in Britain she will never again have to leave it. Once here it will not matter whether she wins her appeal or loses it, for even if she loses she will have appeal after appeal and these will be able to drag on until the end of her days.

Even if there is an order to remove her it will not be acted upon; her lawyers and the considerable lobby of people who like to argue on the grounds of human rights will make every possible argument in her defence. If Britain even thinks of keeping her citizenship revoked then it will have to send her somewhere, and every country in the world will be presented as too barbaric or inconvenient for Ms Begum to reside there. And so we will be stuck with her, and one of the strangest and most unjusts aspects of modern warfare will repeat itself.

Suggested reading

Will Libya tear Nato apart?

By Aris Roussinos

The attraction of war was always the same. Men and women of violence could take what they wanted by force. If they were successful, then there was nothing in the world that they could not have.

But the most basic restraining mechanism on war throughout time has always been that the consequences of losing are so catastrophic. For if you lost then you could lose everything: your home, your loved ones, your life.

And that is why the case of people like Begum is so unsatisfactory. She and her cohorts waged war against this country and our allies; they lost, and by the most fundamental laws of justice and war they should have lost everything.

And yet they didn’t. They waged war and lost and countries like Britain still contemplated returning them to the status quo ante. So it isn’t just that you can sign up for the home or away team. You can sign up for the away team and if they lose you can demand to be treated with all the same rights and respect as though you were playing for the home team all the way along.

That is why the case of Begum rankles. It is not just against this or that article or law; it howls out against one of the most fundamental rules of human justice: the rule that the most terrible actions should have the most terrible consequences.