The ISIL Returnees Issue: The Dilemma of Unmitigated Child Abuse

"The government has absolutely no choice but to protect the Charter rights of these Canadians [who choose to go abroad to fight with terrorists in Syria and Iraq]."
"The embassy, the consulate would have to deal with them, the way they would any Canadian who's gotten in trouble abroad and assist them to come home if that's what they want to do."
"They [federal officials] always stress ... 'We cannot in any way afford to allow our actions to result in a Canadian citizen receiving basically torture, or abuse. That will never happen again'."
Lorne Dawson, professor, University of Western Ontario

"Does the Canadian government have a legal, let alone a moral, responsibility to act on these people's behalf? I think the answer is 'No'."
"They made a conscious decision to leave this country and to join a group that everyone and his dog knows is a terrorist group ... 'It sucks to be you; live with it'."
"This issue of orphans and kids born to people who joined Islamic State is going to haunt us for a decade. Who wants to take care of them? It's not the kids' fault, but these are the sons and daughters of terrorists."
Phil Gurski, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst

"I really think they need to work with the Muslim community in terms of developing plans to assist them."
"They [terrorism-linked returnees] are Canadian kids, we can't just sort of throw them away."
Barbara Jackman, immigration lawyer, Toronto

UN: ISIL kills 163 people in Mosul in one day: Al Jazeera

The issue is undeniably a complex one, and fraught with emotion; a sense of compassion for the children born to people who of their own free will have dedicated their time, energy and aspirations to be part of an Islamist caliphate of conquest, restrained by nothing, evincing themselves no compassion whatever for the other Muslims and non-Muslims they slaughter through deliberate enactment of atrocities, the better to shock the watching world.

And it is telling, the response from various sources. From a professional immigration lawyer who speaks for immigrants and refugees, a response weighted in favour of human rights irrespective of the fact that human rights have been entirely trashed by the very people now anxious to return to a society they spurned in favour of one that modelled itself on Islam at its inception in the 6th Century as a warring, conquest-driven ideology encompassing religion, politics, social life.

From a professor who has studied the phenomenon of radicalized  youth from the perspective of a liberal-left profession priding itself on its 'progressive' credentials that allow it to proudly and loudly support the entitlements of Palestinian Arabs whose response to the creation of a Jewish state was to initiate a wide-ranging program of violent assaults, airplane hijacking, suicide bombings, attacks on Jews in foreign countries, the creation of a death cult inciting their youth to become martyrs.

From a man whose prism is that of a former intelligence officer who has seen at first-hand the plots and schemes and actions and crimes of terrorist groups threatening the stability of civilized nations serene in their democratic processes, suddenly placed on notice that their geographical distance from the volatile violence taking place in the Middle East will no longer grant them immunity from violence inflicted on them because the world has become a smaller place where air travel minimizes distance and trained assassins motivated by religious zeal commit themselves with lethal passion, and more latterly Western societies well infiltrated by religious zealots are readily conscripted to jihad.

At the present, and in the moment, as it were, when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the most current iteration of terrorist-jihad central in its purest-yet form of incendiary hatred theologically inspired, is in the process of swift collapse book-ending its swift rise, the issue of the hundreds of Western-sourced Islamists, trained as jihadists in the use of lethal weaponry turn restively to their adopted countries, including what offspring they have conceived. Some of whom have been known as the lion-cubs of ISIL, trained as children to kill, shoot, behead.

Social media images alleging to show an Isil sniper believed to be 16-year-old German Linda W Credit: Twitter

Canada, like other Western countries, is bracing for their return. And how to react, to treat them, to deal with them all, is an issue of grave and great concern. Canadians have experienced a taste of how their government will react under the Liberals, when a mere two weeks earlier, the al-Qaeda/Taliban-linked Omar Khadr, child soldier of Islamofascism was released from his status as a terrorist through a government apology to him, resuscitating his 'reputation' and sweetening it with a $10.5-million gift.

The government of Canada is consumed with the contrite view that it must not under any circumstances be seen to be complicit with other governments seeking to bring to justice Canadian jihadis who might be exposed to some form of torture while imprisoned, preparing to repatriate, perhaps prosecute them, but ensuring they are not persecuted for their misdeeds, as Canadian citizens. The fate of vulnerable children is yet another, critical issue which must be resolved. And it can readily be done.

With the recognition that the parents that bore them did so while threatening and committing unspeakable violence and planning far more in the future, those parents qualify for the designation and recognition of unqualified to raise those children on the evidence. Those children under their care have not been nurtured with love, but taught hatred. Their destiny, as far as their parents were concerned, was to populate a fascist Islamist state whose agenda was conquest through fear and slaughter.

Having proven themselves incapable of raising children in a familial environment based on the virtues of civilized society and providing for those children security and nourishment of the spirit, the children should be taken into custodial care. Parents charged under the Criminal Code under section 83 for leaving Canada to join a terrorist organization, participating in or facilitating terrorist activity or committing a crime for a terror group which has penalties up to life in prison are in no position to raise children.

A little girl named Amina was found by Iraqi Army soldiers when they heard her cries from the rubble.  Credit: Rex