At least it now appears we now know who was responsible for the three Bradford sisters going to Syria: it was the police. Two of their husbands by arrangement, Mohammed Shoaib and Akhtar Iqbal, have said the police urged the sisters to contact their brother who is fighting for ISIS. This, they say, encouraged their radicalisation. This seems fair enough. It couldn’t possibly be the family’s fault, could it?
The police are hardly going to reveal in public specific matters regarding their operations, but I am afraid the suggestion that they are to blame for three women taking their nine children to a violent war zone comes across as what is technically known as tosh. A load of tosh.
I am more inclined to believe that the situation is likely to be down to a number of factors, chief among them being the extreme conservative version of islam practised within their family, to the extent that they, as women, were effectively chained to the house and that moving to Syria might be seen as some sort of bizarre liberation. That is what some locals are saying. For you and I, it might seem an irrational series of decisions that led these women to leave the UK but let’s be honest: it can’t be that easy being a muslim woman.
I am more sorry for the poor victims of ISIS than any of its supporters or apologists. The child victims of rape, those alleged homosexuals thrown to their deaths from high buildings, the Jordanian pilot who was burned alive, the aid workers and those of other religions who were beheaded for the serious crime of not being a muslim fanatic. Somehow, these people seem to have been forgotten with the media obsession with the three women who have chosen to go to Syria, taking their children with them.
The two husbands would do better to look themselves in the mirror and examine whether they had some part in their wives disappearance and if their religious superstitions encouraged them? But, please, spare me the protestations that it was someone else’s fault, in this instance the police. I’m really not interested in that one, thank you.
