Sisters

What, the media constantly asks, is it about organisations like ISIS or al-Shabaab which attracts British citizens to go to abroad to places like Syria? I ask the question since no one seems to have the first idea of what the answer is. Everyone who goes to Syria is a polite, well-mannered person who worked hard at school and wouldn’t say boo to a goose. How, then, are these poor people “radicalised”? Indeed, what possesses three Bradford sisters to take their nine children to a new life in Syria? It’s not like emigrating to Australia, is it?

We now learn that this was not the first time these women tried to fulfil their dream of joining the middle eastern caliphate ISIS is trying to create. It turns out that in March, they were taken off a plane when they were heading to – yes, you’ve guessed it – Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps it was the prospect of meeting Mohammed Emwaz, who has been given the affectionate media nickname of Jihadi John. The sisters must have heard about him from the slick beheading DVDs produced by ISIS.

Or maybe they were attracted by the systematic rape and enslavement of women?

Or the ISIS attitude to people they declare to be gay? Thrown them off a tall building and if that doesn’t kill them, stone them to death when they reach the ground.

Maybe the mass beheading of Coptic Christians, the flogging in public of women and employing children to carry out terrorist activities appealed?

I am not trying to make light of what is happening here, just trying to make sense of it. I am guessing that these are not stupid women and they have made the decision to travel with their children where all these things are going on.

Like me, they would have surely seen the evil, senseless murders of innocent people in appalling circumstances so in possession of that knowledge, why did they decide to join up with the perpetrators?

How much of this can be attributed to brainwashing or that somehow these women have been duped? I do understand how it is possible to brainwash people, especially very young people, because that’s how religion works. Catch ’em young is a strategy employed by all religions, not just islam. But unless the sisters have felt like this about ISIS all along, what changed, assuming anything did?

It stretches the imagination to suggest the sisters have no idea what things are really like in Syria and Iraq. I have described some aspects of life under ISIS, but the day to day reality is little better. Women are virtually prisoners in every aspect of their lives, not just in what they can wear – black from head to toe – and what they can do – almost nothing.

And what of their children? ISIS has decreed that girls can be married at the age of nine. That’s nine years of age. Do they somehow believe their own daughters will be spared the attention of rapists and paedophiles, because there is absolutely no evidence they will be?

Before we feel too sorry for the families, let’s have a thought for those who have been tortured and murdered by the terrorists these women want to be with. In all the media hysteria, the victims have once again been all but forgotten and we need to remember who the main victims have been.