Islamist Demands

"Then finally he said you have to come, but I was studying English and Middle Eastern studies. I didn't know anything about ISIS or anything. He said just come and see. Come and see."
"You're eating Pringles and Twix bars ... you don't feel like you're in a war."
"Do I regret it, coming [to Syria] you mean? No, I don't, in the sense I had my kids here [in the ISIS caliphate]."
“Briefly, just briefly I heard about some executions taking place. When I came here I heard [of the Islamic State atrocities committed against the Yazidi minority]. I haven’t seen one but…. Well, having slaves is part of Sharia [Islamic law]. I believe in Sharia, wherever Sharia is. We must follow whoever is implementing the way, the law."
Dura Ahmed, 28, Torontonian, obedient Muslim and ISIS wife

Dura Ahmed, 28, from Toronto has no regrets about traveling to join her ISIS husband. The mother of two is now trying to get out of Syria.SCREENGRAB/ CNN

"He's like, 'it's obligatory for you to come here. You have no choice, and as your husband I'm telling you to come here'. And as a Muslim wife you have to obey, even though it was really hard for me to do it. I had to."
"I was just trying to be an obedient wife." 
"I'm not the kind of person who watched the news. I didn't follow any of this kind of stuff. I used to be a graphic designer and I used to work from home and just take care of the kids. I was never interested in what was going on in the world."
"It was too dangerous [to send her children to school in Raqqa] and there were too many bombings. They don't speak Arabic. So I taught them myself."
Name withheld, Albertan Muslima, 34

Two Canadian citizens. Two women who grew up in Canada, attended school in Canada, the younger still a university student when she left Canada in 2014 to join her husband, an ISIL fighter in Syria, in the capital of the caliphate, Raqqa, the other a stay-at-home mother to her two sons, working from home as a graphic designer. Cosmopolitan you might think, given their youth and occupations and the country they lived in. But no, Muslima who subscribed to Sharia, Islamists by inclination claiming to have known nothing about the war being waged by Islamic State against everyone else; Shiites, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, insufficiently devout Sunnis and of course Western interlopers.

Neither had any idea of the beheadings of British and American journalists, of the videoed butchery of prisoners. ISIL children in Raqqa were being fiercely indoctrinated into the ideology, shown gruesome videos, taught how to use weapons, encouraged to take part in executions, proudly displayed as ISIL 'lion cubs', but these women, though living within the caliphate, in its very centre and capital, had no knowledge of any of this. Too busy eating Pringles, evidently.

In any event, it was the men who were at fault. The men they married. They were totally innocent of any wrong-doing, just doing their thing, whatever it is that Sharia requires of unquestioning, obedient Muslim wives subservient to the wishes of Muslim husbands. The meter on their humanitarian instincts appears to have gone off-kilter, verified by their frank responses to an interviewer. Frank, or simply expressions of entitlement as stalwarts of Islamist conquest?

Civilians who have fled fighting in Bagouz wait to board trucks after being screened by members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) at a makeshift screening point in the desert on February 9, 2019 in Bagouz, Syria. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

These are only two who have been identified as Canadians. Presumably there are many more. More just like them from all over the Western world who gravitated to Syria to join the brave new world of the caliphate. Women with the children they happily begot with ISIL terrorists. only to them they're Islamic heroes, merely performing pious acts required of them by Islamic tradition which is not to be questioned; duty is to enlist in jihad and that is final. The caliphate they were so anxious to join they are now equally anxious to leave, prepared now to embark on another life experience; rescue from discomfort in a refugee camp for displaced ISIL family members as the Free Syrian Army, mostly led by Kurds destroys what little remains of the caliphate.

The unnamed woman's Bosnian swain died after leaving Canada to fight with ISIL, leaving her on her own for two years in Raqqa until she married another Canadian ISIL fighter whose spawn she now carries. From graphic designer to hanger-on in a Syrian war zone. Obedient to Islam and the sequential husbands. Second husband too now dead, although to be sure, he was a cook for ISIL, not an active fighter, she insists, leading one to the impression that ISIL had a whole lot of cooks, a non-combat contingent who just happened to die in battle.

Fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) attend the funeral of a fellow fighter from the Kurdish women’s protection units (YPJ), who was killed while fighting against ISIL in northeastern Syrian Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli on February 9, 2019. DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images

While the Syrian Democratic Forces are busily eliminating the last of the geographic caliphate, reports are circulating that ISIL forces are re-assembling, prepared to re-enter those areas they once held as soon as the military forces supporting the FSA militias take their leave of Syria. Those sleeper cells in Syria and Iraq are not inactive, laying groundwork for an insurgency, much as the Taliban in Afghanistan have done for many years. Counterterrorism is not a part-time occupation wherever violent Islam has taken root, and that is just about everywhere in the Muslim world.

Bring these women and their children back 'home' to Canada? They've found their spiritual home in Syria, why deprive them of it? Why on the other hand, burden Canada with the upkeep of such detestable creatures with their ghoulish preoccupation with Sharia and how slavery is permissible, consigning women of other cultures and religious beliefs to rape and soulless degradation? To spread their venomous beliefs back in Canada?

The good old days in Raqqa where the Pringles were plentiful. GETTY IMAGES